Change in Realities
by bravevulnerability
Summary: "Someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile." An AU story set after the events of 2x24, 'A Deadly Game', for Christmas.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** **Like most of my stories that are posted during this time of year, there will be a chapter posted every day leading up to the Christmas holiday and like each Christmas story I've shared in the past, I hope that it can be seen as a gift to all who have added so much beautiful, every day magic to my life with your endless amounts of kindness, encouragement, and friendship.**

 **Thank you all for everything.**

* * *

 _"Someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile."_

 _\- Fred Gaily, Miracle on 34th Street_

* * *

He walks away with his arm around his ex-wife and Kate's heart crushed in his hand, pieces of it left like shrapnel in his palm. She watches with the gaping hole in her chest raw and stinging. She didn't love him, not then, but she could have. Part of her wanted to.

But the possibilities of that ever happening disappeared with him to the Hamptons for a summer that never ended.

* * *

It isn't the last time she sees him.

He comes to the hospital after she's stabbed, rushing into her room with pale skin and stricken eyes that roam over the brittle state of her body in the bed. She's been casually dating a doctor for the last few months, but her heart has never stumbled for Josh like it does for Castle in that single moment.

"Beckett," he gets out, clearing his throat and glancing belatedly to the flowers in his arm. He holds them up. "I heard you were opening a flower store."

Her lips crack into the smallest of smiles. She hates herself for missing him.

But she would swear by the look on his face that he's missed her too.

Castle takes a seat beside her bed, placing the flowers on the table amongst the slew of others.

"What happened?"

She swallows hard, the stab wound in her side somehow flaring with the work of her throat, protesting at even the tiniest of breaths.

"Dragon," she manages, watching his eyes darken. He looks so much… older than he did a single year ago, worn down. For some reason, she feels responsible for it.

"Why didn't you call me?" he asks, but Kate simply stares back at him.

"You never called," she states. His brow furrows, as if she's talking nonsense, and she purses her lips. "You went to the Hamptons and never came back, Castle. You made it clear what you wanted."

"I - did you ever think for a second that maybe I was waiting on _you_ to call?" he challenges, but she doesn't have the time for this, the energy. Doesn't have the will to let him pick away at the scab covering her heart that's finally started to close, heal.

"I figured you were too busy meeting deadlines for your second ex-wife," she mutters, wincing as the stitches in her side pull, as she hears the words that just came out of her own mouth.

His brow arcs. "Is that what this is about?"

"How is Gina, by the way?"

Oh, this is bad. She's high on pain medication she never even wanted, aching from a knife wound that should have killed her, and saying too much.

Castle sits back, the lines scaling his features hardening. "I wouldn't know, personally. She's just my publisher."

Huh.

"Why does that matter to you?"

Shit.

"It doesn't." She closes her eyes and rests her head back against the pillow.

"Apparently, it does, especially if that's why you didn't call to tell me you were going after a professional hitman on your own. Ryan told me you were tortured, Beckett," he reveals, his voice hitching before he attempts to clear it once more. Her lids slit open, assessing the concern in his gaze. More than concern. Her lungs burn with the memory of ice water. "Hal Lockwood nearly blew out your kneecap."

"But he didn't," she mutters, because she's been pointedly trying _not_ to think about the hour she spent with her hands tied and her head in a tub of ice water while Hal Lockwood stood over her demanding she confess every detail of her investigation, spill what she knows of his employer.

She kept her mouth shut, endured the torture techniques until the calvary and her moment of opportunity came. Esposito and Ryan took out Lockwood's henchmen and Beckett lunged for him, grappling with him to the floor and landing a few good punches to his jaw before he pulled a knife.

Esposito was the one to drag her off of him, but she wasn't fighting, not anymore. The blood streamed crimson and thick from her side and her body sagged to the floor, gave up on her.

"No, he just stuck a knife in you instead," he huffs and Kate grits her teeth. He shouldn't even be here. He's not part of their team, he hasn't been for a year, but something tells her that her boys still trust him as if he is. Especially with this.

"You were stabbed and left for dead like your mother, and you didn't even think to call-"

"I didn't call because you're not a part of this anymore," she growls, fisting her hands atop the hospital sheets. "I haven't seen you in nearly a year, Rick. Why would I call you?"

His throat, unshaven and peppered with stubble - how long has he been here? - works through a swallow. Finally, he nods, rising from the chair at her bedside.

"The only thing that's clear is that you never knew what I wanted," he mutters under his breath, striding out the door. But she hears his words, almost demands to know what they mean.

Part of her is afraid she already does.

* * *

Beckett pursues the investigation of her mother's case for a year without pause, the sting in her side a constant reminder of her own self-destruction. It never fully heals, neither does she, but she's become used to the jagged edges inside of her, the way she rips herself to shreds from the inside out. She just can't let it go, she won't.

Even if it means getting those she cares about most killed.

Her mother believed that truth will always conquer, prevail, and reveal itself in time. Secrets, lies, and betrayal can never stay hidden forever. Montgomery teaches her that in a way she never would have expected.

She never would have expected him to be a part of this. But when Lockwood escapes from prison, when she and the boys uncover the existence of a third cop, another involved with Raglan and McCallister, the evidence leads to their captain.

It leads her to a late night alone in an airplane hangar with him, a gun in his hand and baited killers on their way for her. It leads to Castle appearing from the shadows, looking just as confused and devastated as she does.

It's the first time she's seen him in over six months, since the hospital, nearly another year passed between them.

"What are you doing here?" she breathes, her attention splitting between Castle and Montgomery while the pain from her knife wound threatens to split her in half.

"I called him," Montgomery answers instead. "Castle, get her out of here."

To his credit, Rick tries to argue, to reason with Roy, but there's no time. The headlights of a black SUV are closing in, Montgomery's voice rises with urgency, and in seconds, Castle is banding his arms around her waist and hoisting her off the ground while she cries out in protest.

He stays with her, holding her up against her car in the darkness, cradling her head as she buries her sobs in his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he breathes into her ear, his voice the only thing she's able to hear past the thundering of her heart and the agony screaming in her side. "I'm so sorry, Kate. I'm sorry."

But it isn't his fault, none of it was ever his fault, and she wraps her arms low around his waist, fisting her fingers in the back of his shirt to keep herself upright. He continues to whisper useless words in her ear, tightening his arms around her every time a shot fires, until the final one rings through the air.

She knows it's over then and chokes out a sob against Castle's throat.

* * *

He takes her home that night, staying on her couch despite her insistence that he go home. He attends Montgomery's funeral days later, sitting beside her in the front row with the other officers. Ever since that night in the hangar, her side has been brutal in its pain, the year old knife wound spitting fire through her veins, constricting her muscles in agony. She can barely stand, definitely not on a podium to deliver a speech that tastes like gunshot residue on her tongue.

His mother and daughter are eyeing her as the service concludes and Rick helps her rise from her seat, Alexis's gaze alight with uncertainty. Because his daughter knows, just like Kate does, that as long as he is with her, he's not safe.

"I'm sorry he dragged you into this," she murmurs, the sun beating down on her shoulders, through the material of her dress blues. "I'm sorry you had to-"

"I'm not," he argues quietly in the cemetery thick with mourning officers and Roy Montgomery's stricken family members. "I'm glad he called."

"He shouldn't have," she sighs, casting her gaze to the rows of headstones. "He should have let me stay and make a stand with him."

"They would have killed you, Kate."

"You don't know that," she whispers, but instead of arguing with her further, Castle takes her hand.

He squeezes her fingers, seals his thumb to the inside of her wrist. "You have to stop. Or they _will_ kill you, Kate. This isn't just an investigation anymore, it's a war."

"I know," she nods, watching the gentle caress of his thumb nudging the white edge of her glove away to stroke her skin. "But I can't."

"Kate-"

"Castle," she sighs, so tired. Physically, emotionally, every way possible - she's drained. "They killed my mother, my captain - I won't let them get away with this."

"So, what? You're going to die for your cause? Because you aren't going to win this one. Not like this," he presses under his breath, his eyes flicking around the crowd that is dissipating around them, every face feeling like a threat. "Will you just - think about the people who love you. Do you really want to put your dad through that? The boys?"

"And what about you, Rick?" she challenges, arching her brow at him and slipping her hand from his grasp.

"You know I don't want anything to happen to you. I'm - I'm your friend-"

"You don't even know me. You think you do, you've always thought that you do, but you don't," she mutters, turning to leave him. They're about to put her captain in the ground and she's-

Castle grabs her by the elbow, careful enough not to upset her stab wound, but with enough force to stop her.

"I love you," he growls. "Why do you think I kept coming back? Why do you think I showed up when Montgomery called saying you were in trouble?"

She swallows hard, but her throat is closing up, thick and dry and choking her. He can't love her.

"Why do you think I'm here, Kate?"

"Castle, I - I can't," she breathes, feeling the remorse build like a tsunami in her chest.

"Can't what?"

His blue eyes beseech her, searching her face with need, and she closes hers against the devastating expression on his face.

She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, rakes her teeth over the already torn flesh, but she can't get the words out. Can't tell him how she just can't love him back.

"Okay," he murmurs, but his voice is unsteady, raspy. His hand touches her shoulder, a gentle weight that warms the chilled places inside of her. Her eyes flutter open just as he's leaning in, brushing a fleeting kiss to the slash of her cheekbone. Her heart skips and her skin buzzes beneath his lips, but he's pulling back from her a moment later, staring at her with so much sorrow, it steals her breath in the worst way. "Bye, Kate."

He walks away from her with his head down and his hands in his pockets, leaving her alone in the cemetery with the remains of both of their hearts crushed all over the grass.

* * *

She's convinced he must hate her after that and she doesn't blame him. It's better this way, though. She's radioactive, a ticking time bomb for anyone who dares to get too close, and she doesn't want him to become another victim of her life's regular implosions.

It's hard without him, it always has been, but it's even harder with his confession of love playing like a broken record in her mind. It keeps her heart from healing, in constant disrepair. She wonders how many pieces of her body can stop functioning before her entire system finally gives out on her.

Sinking back into her mother's case, into Montgomery's, is what keeps her sane while ripping her sanity to shreds at the same time. She digs deep, down the rabbit hole once again, dragging Ryan and Esposito at least halfway down with her this time. Until she finally uncovers the identity of the dragon, learns his name.

William Bracken.

She finds him with ease and confronts him at one of his glorified campaign speeches inside of a fancy hotel, where she's forced to do the unthinkable.

"I would hate to have to make you an orphan, Detective Beckett. Or worse, kill that writer of yours."

She strikes a deal.

"He's not mine. And you won't touch him, or me, or anyone else I care about."

"Oh," Bracken smiles at her, sinister in the shadows of the hotel's kitchen. "And why is that?"

A deal that lives upon a lie.

"I have the file. Smith had another copy."

Her knowledge of the file's existence is true. She was able to track down Michael Smith, but the file was never recovered after one of Bracken's assassins caused an explosion that stole his life and the paper evidence, its only real copy.

But the stretch of truth puts Bracken exactly where she needs him to be. For now, at least. And it keeps her safe, keeps her dad, her family at the Twelfth, and Richard Castle, safe. It isn't justice for her mom, but it's enough. For the next two years, she tells herself it has to be.


	2. Chapter 2

The next time she sees Castle is an accident, similar to those that happen when there are too many cars on the road and one goes skidding out of control. Christmas is closing in and work is crazier than ever for her, Richard Castle is the last thing she needs thrown into the mix. And yet, she's the one to cause the collision.

Since her deal with Bracken, since being forced by her own hand to back down from investigating her mother's murder for the time being, she's doubled her hours at the precinct and the time she dedicates to her cases. It's unhealthy and Burke, her therapist, keeps telling her to take a step back, but she can't do that either. If her days aren't jam-packed with necessary responsibilities, she ends up alone with herself, her thoughts, her regrets.

And she would rather run herself ragged than deal with any of those.

Though, her extra work does pay off.

She just claimed the position of Captain only a couple of months ago, but her mom is still without justice and the hole in her chest gapes with more than disappointment. She aches with an annoying loneliness and a missing piece she never knew she would need.

And Castle won't stop rubbing salt in the wound.

He continued writing about her. It's been three years since he stood in her hospital room, two since she told him a final goodbye at Montgomery's funeral, an expression that resembled heartbreak claiming his face. But his heart was never hers to break.

She must have had some claim, though, if the three Nikki Heat books that followed are any indication. If the consecutive number of invitations to his book parties mean anything.

But she doesn't want to see him again at a book party. She doesn't know if she ever wants to see him again, period.

Does she?

Kate unlocks the door to her empty apartment, cold and quiet with the lack of life. She hardly spends any time here with most of her days and nights devoted to long hours at the precinct, sorting through papers and politics, craving the chase of a criminal down city streets.

She's in need of a break, even she can see that, but sitting stir crazy and alone in her apartment, resorting to her usual habit of going over the box of her mother's case in her office, is hardly appealing.

His stupid book party is tonight.

Kate sighs and scrapes both hands through her hair, bridges her fingers at her nape.

She does have that dress she bought with Lanie a couple of months ago, white with gold and hanging untouched in the back of her closet...

She gnaws on her bottom lip. It's late December, crazed Christmas shoppers are roaming the city, the air is sharp with the cold, and according to the invitation she was sent, the party will be holiday themed. She avoids the holidays like the plague.

But maybe she's tired of avoiding him.

Kate dresses quickly, fussing over the waves of her hair before managing to tie them back into a loose bun that looks far more artful than it is, and touching up her makeup. Her hand shakes with uncertainty as she strokes the last coat of mascara to her lashes, her legs unsteady in her heels, but it's not a big deal.

He's probably parading around the rooftop venue (not the same as where they met, that would just be too much nostalgia for her), a gorgeous blonde on his arm with his signature scribbled across her chest, and his smile sickeningly wide.

She slips the brush of mascara back into its tube, wonders if she's being too harsh on him. Their first few months working together were rough, damn near agonizing, but those that followed… she was beginning to admit to herself then that she actually liked having him around. Not the playboy she met that first night she arrested him, but the loving son, father, and friend. The man who offered up a hundred grand without blinking for a mere shot at catching her mother's killer, the man who burst into her burning apartment to pull her naked body from a bathtub and never spoke of the fact that he saw more than he would ever admit, the man who let her stay at his loft for two weeks afterwards and spent every night looking at her as if he never wanted her to leave.

A man she maybe could have loved in another life.

That's the man she won't deny she's hoping to see tonight.

* * *

The bite of the cold weather nips at the exposed skin of her legs as she steps out of the cab just a few blocks from the party's venue. She needs a few minutes in it, though, to let the chill of winter clear her head of its muddled thoughts and sharpen her senses before she goes inside, risks seeing him again.

The last few times he saw her weren't exactly pleasant. During the first, she had stitches in her side, pulling together a scar that tightens and tugs with her every step, and was wearing nothing but a hospital gown. The time after that, he was dragging her away from certain death, then suffering her unspoken rejection at Montgomery's funeral days later. She isn't sure exactly what she's hoping for tonight, all she knows is that she wants this time to be different from those.

Less painful.

The building comes into view from a block away, the glitter of reds, golds, and greens illuminating the sky above and Kate takes a breath. She'll just stay for a little while, mingle, have a drink, indulge in the weight of his words in her hands for a few minutes, and if she doesn't see him within an hour, she'll leave.

Yeah, good compromise.

Kate buries her hands in the pockets of her coat, but just as she starts forward once more, the flicker of confidence in her chest waning but fighting to stay alight, the man of the hour is rounding the corner and ramming straight into her.

"Whoa," he breathes, catching her by the shoulders. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't-" His apologies fall away as he meets her eyes, realizes who he's bumped into. "Beckett?"

Running into him is an accident that hits her like a car crash, air bags exploding within the cage of her ribs and crushing her lungs. She sucks in another breath through the wreckage.

"In a hurry?" Kate questions, arching an eyebrow before flicking her gaze to the hands still clutching her shoulders. He quickly lets her go, takes an immediate step back. Her traitorous body mourns the warmth.

"Actually, I was just-" He glances back to the building while she assesses his attire. Crisp black pea coat over a red button down, pleated slacks, hair done to perfection - definitely dressed to be the center of a special occasion.

"You should be at your book party right about now, shouldn't you?" she asks, watching his throat work through a difficult swallow. "Castle, were you... running away?"

His gaze swivels back to her and he quickly manages an expression of incredulity. "What? No, I just - needed some air."

But he was never very good at lying to her.

Kate nods, shifting as he suddenly devotes his attention to assessing her, not so subtly roaming his eyes over her frame. The realization flares bright in his gaze.

"Were you on your way to my book party?"

Nerves buzz like bees in the pit of her stomach, ascending to what's left of her chest. Maybe the invitations he sent really were just out of courtesy.

"I just thought... you sent an invitation-"

"Of course I sent an invitation," he chuckles, some of the devastation clearing from his eyes, but the sound of his laughter is still hollow. "I always send an invitation. I just kinda stopped expecting any form of response from them."

He shrugs, not visibly upset, but it doesn't fail to elicit a pang of guilt in her gut.

"Sorry, Castle, I've just been busy and-"

"Oh, I know. _Captain_ Beckett," he says with relish, the smile spreading across his lips. It holds the lighthearted teasing he always used on her, but it's not the same. The stretch of his mouth is strained, the lines around his eyes deepened, everything about him forced in a way she's witnessed him project towards others, but never her.

 _Maybe that's what happens when a man tells you he loves you and you reciprocate by giving him the cold shoulder for two years,_ her mind supplies.

Her cheeks warm and she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yeah, with that. And after the last time we saw each other - I'm sorry, about what I said to you that day. I know you cared about Roy too."

His face falls a little and he mimics her position, shoving his hands in the pockets of his coat and pursing his lips.

"The dedication in _Heat Rises_ was great. He would have appreciated it," she adds, remembering sitting up with that book all night during a weekend in her father's cabin, her heart aching in time with her stab wound.

"It felt right, given the circumstances," he murmurs, scuffing the toe of his shoe along a sidewalk line. "Any movement on Bracken?"

The question sends a shiver down her spine.

"The boys told you?"

"Not much," he assures her. "And I pushed them for the information, so don't blame-"

"What? When?" she inquires, taking a step closer, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body again. "And why?"

"Why?" he scoffs, lifting his eyes to the night sky and shaking his head. "Because you were stabbed, Kate. Because you were nearly killed like Montgomery was. After that, I - shit, I worried about you all the time. At least by keeping me in the loop, it helped me know that you were okay, still alive."

She almost asks why he would even care, but no, that isn't fair. Before he walked away with Gina, he saved her life more times than she cares to count and it was never for the sole sake of nobility, notoriety. Before he walked away on the day of Montgomery's funeral, he told her he loved her.

He cares, he always has, just as she has for him. Not that she's done a fine job of showing it.

"You could have just asked me."

Castle narrows his eyes. "I wasn't a part of it anymore. You said so yourself."

"Yeah, well that was three years ago, and maybe I was wrong," she admits on a sigh, some of the hardened lines of his face softening just slightly. "You were always a part of it, you always belonged, and if you want the truth-"

The flash of a camera over his shoulder catches her attention and Rick follows her gaze, curses under his breath.

"After this last book, they're worse than ever," he mutters, glancing back to her with frustration tugging his lips into a scowl. But he looks hopeful when he meets her eyes. "Do you want to grab some coffee, talk somewhere without an unwelcome audience?"

Kate drags her teeth over her bottom lip, holds it captive for a long moment. Another burst of light flashes, closer this time, and she nods.

"Let's go."

* * *

They slip into a nearby coffee shop and he orders two to-go cups for them while she watches the door. The man with the camera doesn't seem to have followed, no flashes of light visible through the conspicuous glass windows that line the cafe.

"Did we lose him?" Castle is at her back, a cup of coffee held out to her.

Her lips quirk and she turns to accept, curling her chilled fingers around the steaming cardboard. "I think so. Must not be interesting enough for him."

He huffs in offense. "Excuse you? I'm _very_ interesting. Haven't you heard? The world is dying to know what I'm going to do without Nikki Heat."

Her heart stumbles and not in a good way.

"You... this book is the last in the Heat series?" she asks, her throat closing up. It's stupid, so stupid that she even cares, but he can't just stop writing about Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook. Not yet. Their story isn't over.

"Not this one. I sort of accidentally announced on social media that the next would likely be the final in the series," he explains, curiosity bleeding into his eyes. "There's just not much left to tell."

"How can you say that?" she hisses, tightening her grip around the cup. "There's plenty left to tell."

That small, tentative smile from earlier returns to his lips.

"You've kept up with them?"

"I - well, yeah," she huffs, rolling her eyes when his smile turns to a smirk. "I was already invested after the second book, I wasn't just going to give up on the series."

"Not to mention it's all still based on you. Had to make sure I wasn't going to trash Nikki's character, huh?" he teases, but she shakes her head.

"No, I knew you wouldn't do that," she murmurs, and it's true. He would never destroy a character he worked so hard to build, he would never use his writing to hurt her like that. "You've treated her well."

The grin on his mouth gentles. "And you don't want me to let her go."

"Not prematurely," she shrugs, turning towards the door. It feels too claustrophobic in here, too many windows for eyes to stare into, for snipers to have clear aim through their scopes. He follows her outside without protest.

"Kinda hard to keep writing her without my inspiration," he confesses, walking with her aimlessly down the sidewalk. She expects to find another smirk, a dancing brow, when she glances up, but he's averting his eyes to a park that lies ahead, steadfastly _not_ looking at her.

He isn't teasing, isn't bargaining with her, just stating a fact that sears through her.

"Maybe a few days back at the precinct could help with that," she reasons, her words quiet but more certain than she feels.

Castle's gaze swivels back to her, sparkling and cerulean and hopeful, but still lined with something painful.

"You were saying something earlier, about the truth?" he prompts, their footsteps slowing as they venture from concrete to grass. The moist blades of it lick at the edges of her ankle boots, the tall points of her heels sinking into the dirt.

Kate sighs, drifts with him towards an empty swing set. May as well sit down for this.

"By the way, you should know, I meant to call you, that summer before - before everything got worse," he blurts before she can gather her own words. She stops short of the swings, her chest tightening. "Gina is... she's great, but we never work out, we were never _going_ to work out, and inviting her to the Hamptons was a mistake on my part. But it felt better than sticking around the city, watching you with Demming."

Wow, she hasn't heard that name in years. Hasn't thought about Tom in so long. Every time the sweet robbery detective with bad timing comes to mind, she's overwhelmed with too much regret to handle.

"That's why I never came back, never called," he confesses on a sigh. "You didn't need me there. Not that you ever did, but definitely not when you had him."

Kate can't help the roll of her eyes. He's so melodramatic, acting as if she replaced him with Tom, but maybe... well, if she tries to see it from his perspective, maybe she can understand how he would feel that way. How - if he really was on the same page as she was at that time, eager to test the waters, to venture past more than friends - it would carve a hollow spot in his heart that stung with jealousy to see her with another man, just as it did for her when she watched him walk away with Gina.

Shit, this is all her fault, isn't it?

"I broke up with him," she expels what feels like a long kept secret on a breath that rushes from her lungs.

His eyes fly up to meet hers, blown wide by the single sentence, and she averts hers to the swings.

"You... during that summer?"

"No," she murmurs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Right before your 'going away' party. I was going to tell you that I wanted to accept your offer to go to the Hamptons. But it was just - too late."

It was always too late for them, always has been, and maybe it always will be. God, what is she even doing here? Why for a single second did she think that coming out to intentionally search for him tonight would be a good idea?

Castle is uncharacteristically silent at her side and she tears her eyes away from their trained spot on the swing's chains to find him staring back at her with wide eyes and a slackened jaw.

"You were going to come to the Hamptons with me?" he echoes, the pained expression claiming his face shredding at her heart.

Kate stares down at the cup of coffee still cradled in her palms.

"It's okay, Castle. It-"

"Are you kidding me?" he growls, earning the flick of her gaze. His fingers are so tightly curled around his own cup that he may crush it, cause the hot liquid to spill all over his gloved hands. "It's been _years_ , Kate. Four years."

"I know. Look, I'm sorry I showed up tonight. There was no reason for me to-"

"No," he groans, pinching the bridge of her nose. "For the smartest detective in New York City, you can be so damn dense sometimes."

She arches an eyebrow at that. "Excuse me?"

"I meant that it's been four years and I should have been spending them _with_ you," he sighs, deflating before her eyes. "It's been four years and I haven't stopped thinking about you. Obviously." He hooks his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his abandoned book party. "I should have been there with you for every case, when you were stabbed. I was your partner-"

"No," she argues, shaking her head. "I'm glad you weren't there for any of that, Castle. When I tracked down Hal Lockwood that first time, I was being stupid, reckless, and nearly got myself killed. If you would have been with me-"

"I could have had your back," he reasons vehemently.

"Or _you_ could have been killed," she counters, biting down on her lip. "Like Roy was."

"Kate," he sighs, drifting in closer to her. Her mention of Montgomery, the loss of him and the truth of his betrayal, still makes her heart throb. "That wasn't your fault."

"You were there," she murmurs, scraping at the lid of her cup with her thumbnail. "You know he died because of a deal made for me."

"He died because he was trying to repent for his past," he points out, his voice low and rich and soothing. "That deal he made was part of that - Roy trying to redeem himself, saving you like he couldn't save your mother."

Her eyes ascend to the sky, devoid of stars but streaked with the bright lights of the city, to stop the sting from taking over. She just wants this conversation to end, wish it never even started. But maybe it's what they both needed, maybe now they can have closure, move on. Even if the irritating muscle that beats strong in her chest doesn't want to.

"I know I've never been a big believer in fate, but maybe it all happened for a reason, you know?"

"Montgomery's death?"

"No," she murmurs, the corners of her mouth tugging even further downwards. "Us. I - I care about you, Rick, but maybe the timing was wrong for a reason, maybe we're just not supposed to be in each other's lives."

His brow creases, as if she isn't making any sense, and she sighs.

"Like I said, I'm sorry I came here tonight, but it was - good to see you again," she admits, returning her gaze to the cup cooling in her hands. "And thanks for the coffee."

She turns to take to go before this can get any worse, but he snags her elbow.

"Kate." His fingers hook in the fabric of her coat and reel her back in. "Even if that were true, screw fate," he mumbles, catching her face in his hands and draping his mouth over hers before she can even think to stop him.

But as the warmth of his lips blanket hers, spilling heat from his mouth to spread through her bloodstream, she doesn't want him to stop. She wants more.

Kate coils her fingers in the lapels of his coat and drags him closer, nipping at his upper lip and slicking her tongue to the spot as he moans. His hands tangle in her hair, unraveling strands from the bun at her neck, stroking his thumb to the sensitive skin behind her ears.

His lips part over hers and she sighs into his mouth, tries to catch her breath. She thinks his coffee fell to the grass with hers, the scent of it mingling with the night air, and she catches a hint of vanilla.

He remembered her coffee order.

"Because it isn't fate, Beckett," he murmurs, lips brushing hers as he speaks, causing her focus to slip with every graze of contact. "That was just us being stubborn and stupid."

She can't argue with that, not when she's standing in the middle of a park with him, just a couple of nights before Christmas with his mouth on hers. It has her mourning the time she wasted, the day she dismissed him from her hospital room with harsh words, in the cemetery when he told her he loved her and she chose to let him go instead of love him back.

Kate cups his cheeks in her hands and presses a kiss to his mouth that probably bleeds with too much sorrow, but he doesn't push her away. Castle's hands slip from her hair, the remains of her bun, to scale down her back, arms snaking around her frame. He kisses her back, soothes her sadness with the stroke of his tongue until the ache in her heart is easing.

"Stubborn, stupid," she echoes breathlessly. "And hoping I could keep you safe."

His brow creases against hers. "Keep me safe?"

"I made a deal with Bracken," she explains, sweeping her thumb to the delicate skin beneath his eye as they flare with subtle shock. "If Ryan told you as much as I think he did, then you know there was a file."

"Yeah, but - it was never found," he murmurs, as if he's still trying to piece together the puzzle that not even she can complete.

"No, but I tracked down the man who made it, the one Montgomery had a deal with. He gave me enough information to make Bracken think I did, to keep the deal intact," she sighs, the usual wave of shame washing through her every time she mentions the deal she made with a devil. "But something Montgomery's friend, Smith, said - he said I'm radioactive and he's right. Castle, everyone I love dies because I put them in danger. I've always known it because it's always been true, because it keeps happening, and I just - I didn't want you to be another piece of collateral damage."

She lowers her hands from his face, draping her palms at his chest, while his move to clutch at her hips.

"Kate, you've been fighting for justice for your mom. I've never faulted you for that, I just didn't want you to die trying." One of his hands squeezes her hip. "That first summer we spent apart, knowing what I do now - I'd do anything to change that."

She bites her lip. "Me too."

"I wish I would have heard what you were going to say that day, that Gina had just been a few minutes late-"

"Castle," she sighs, migrating her hand to his nape and squeezing. "What if's will drive you crazy."

"They already are," he mutters and she smirks, combs her fingers through the fine hairs at the base of his skull. It's so surreal, touching him like this, so innocent and intimate while her lips swell from the recent work of his. "But my point is that it was just human error and maybe you have a point about timing. We weren't supposed to be together then. I want to believed we would have made it anyway, that we would have been strong enough, but with everything that followed-"

"I would have pushed you away," she admits, frowning at the automatic truth of it slipping past her lips. "You've seen me with my mother's case - we never would have survived it."

His throat bobs with a swallow, hard acceptance.

"The deal in place now, Bracken can't touch you?"

Kate meets his eyes, confused by the turn of conversation, but shaking her head.

"No."

"Then maybe the timing really is right now," he murmurs. "I know it's not over, but we've always worked better together. We can solve it and then-"

"No," she says again, curling her fingers in the collar of his coat. His face falls, but she speaks before he can assume the worst. "Castle, I'm not against us working together, but I still don't want to put you at risk and more than that... for once in my life, I just want to put my mom's case aside for a while and be happy. It's what she would want and I - I just want you."

The admission leaves her feeling purged, clean and empty and relieved.

"This is going way better than my book party ever would have," he murmurs and a surprised breath of laughter rushes from her throat. His eyes are shining when she looks up again, his smile soft, adoring, and she arches on her toes to taste the elation on his lips.

"Well, this is just too sweet."

Ice water flushes through her chest, her guts, and she jerks her gaze in the direction of William Bracken's voice.

"And so fitting for the holidays," the senator continues, emerging from the shadows granted by the branches of a tree. He's alone, as far as Kate can see, but he's wearing a dark trench coat, a baseball cap on his head. He doesn't plan to be seen, recognized. "Like something straight out of a Hallmark movie."

Castle lets her go, but keeps a tight grip on her waist, fingers bruising. Kate steels herself for a battle, cursing herself for the lack of a gun in her hand. She was going to a book party, didn't think she would need it.

"What are you doing here, Bracken?" she questions through grit teeth.

His smile makes her skin crawl. He looks far too smug, pleased with himself; he looks like he's stolen the power all over again.

"Well, first of all, congratulations are in order. I heard your new book is flying off the shelves, Mr. Castle," the senator comments, strolling through the short distance of the park towards them. "And now, you seem to be in your first public relationship in over... what was it? Four years? Quite a night for you."

Castle doesn't speak, sparing nothing but a glare for the man standing only a few feet away from them now.

"Though, not to say you remained completely celibate in your time waiting for Kate here to come around, right?"

Rick's scowl deepens. "What are you talking about?"

"Ah, this is the part where it gets a bit awkward," Bracken sighs, folding his hands in front of him like he's delivering bad news to his campaign staff. "As Detective - excuse me, _Captain_ Beckett, just told you, we had a deal. But considering what we know about me and Kate's mother, I didn't exactly consider her the most trustworthy person to partner with. Obviously, you never really fell out of her life. Keeping tabs on you as well was a precaution I couldn't avoid taking."

"What the hell are you talking about, Bracken?" Kate demands, shaking off Castle's hand to step forward. Gun or not, she'll take him down with her bare hands if she has to.

"Listening devices are such convenient things to have." Her blood runs frigid. "I have to admit, I give you credit for keeping your word this long, Kate. And not only that, but for managing to keep the truth of our deal a secret. When you told me you had that file, I really believed you, but now..." He shrugs. "I'm a little disappointed, but not exactly surprised."

She growls. "You-"

"Hold all the cards. I always have, but _you_ -" Bracken pauses, has to take a deep breath, exposing the first hint of fury. "You made me think for the last two years that I was in jeopardy of losing my reputation. You can't even imagine the delay you have put in my running for presidency."

"President?" Castle scoffs.

Bracken narrows his gaze on him. "That's right Mr. Castle. I held off on my campaigning solely because of this - because of Captain Beckett here. You're not exactly easy to kill and I couldn't risk a screw up, that leak of information I was tricked into thinking you possessed. But now?" Some of the tension drains from his expression, the cool smile returning. "I may have lost two years, but I can get everything back on track with you out of the way."

Rick steps up beside her, his jaw squaring and his chest heaving with a deep breath. She's never seen Castle in a protective state, never pictured his stature charged with rage or associated him with intimdation, but in that moment, she catches sight of a side to him she's yet to know.

"You're not going to touch her."

"You're absolutely right, Mr. Castle," Bracken concedes with a nod, but his gaze ascends over their heads and Kate's stomach drops with dread. "The deal's off."

A glimmer of light from one of the buildings above snags her eye and she squints. Another paparazzi following them, a camera flashing? But no-

" _Kate_!"

It's not the flash of the camera. It's the reflection of light on a rifle's scope.

She spins to push Castle away, as far away as possible, but he's colliding with her in the same moment that the bullet does.


	3. Chapter 3

She startles awake with a gasp, the fiery path of the bullet searing through her chest, pricking her eyes with tears. Kate reaches for her sternum, fingers scrambling for the site of the shot. She whimpers, curling in on herself as her fingertips graze the spot between her breasts, singing with agony that spreads like open flames.

"Kate." Her eyes flutter as his voice breaches the haze of pain, the cup of his palm to her shoulder spiking a belated flood of terror through her veins. He needs to get out of here, away from her, before the sniper can take his next shot.

"Castle," she rasps, struggling to open her eyes.

The voice above clears his throat. "Captain."

Her brow furrows. He's never called her that, he wouldn't - that isn't Castle's voice.

Kate blinks past the dissipating burn consuming her chest, still tight with an ache she can't explain even as her vision clears. She expects him to be there, lying beside her, but it's not the unforgiving winter air on her skin or the cool touch of grass beneath her cheek that she feels as she clings to the rope of her consciousness. No night sky or swing sets, nothing she remembers from the final moments before the bullet hit.

She's not outside at all; she's in her office, lying on the too small couch with a throw pillow clutched to her chest, and Kevin Ryan crouched over her with concern etched into the lines around his eyes.

"Fell asleep in your office again, Beckett?" he asks softly, a touch of sympathy in the question that she doesn't understand.

She swallows and presses her hand flat to what is supposed to be the cold, wet ground, finding leather beneath her palm instead.

"What happened?" she croaks, pushing up onto her elbow and blearily scanning her surroundings. The room is dark, the lights from the city seeping in past the blinds the only source of illumination. "Where... where's Rick?"

Ryan sucks in a breath and Kate jerks her attention back to her colleague. God, what did Bracken do with Castle?

"Is Rick... a boyfriend?" Ryan inquires, gentle and consoling, like he's talking to his daughter.

But even in her current state of confusion, her skin warms, blood flushing to her neck.

Kate shakes her head. At least he's making jokes, Castle must be okay if Ryan is teasing her about him. "You know it's not like that with Castle, Ryan."

"Castle?" Ryan repeats, narrowing his eyes on her like she's not making any sense, like she's some mentally unstable suspect.

"Yeah, I - I went to his book party last night and we-"

"Book party? Beckett, you were still here when I left a few hours ago, you're even wearing the same clothes, when did you have time to go to a book party?" Ryan questions, rising from his haunches as she sits up on the couch, her fist still pressed to her chest. "And are you okay? Having trouble breathing?"

"What?"

"You keep clutching your chest. Is your heart bothering you?" Ryan asks, some of the scrutiny giving way to that recurring concern once more.

"Is that... where I got shot?"

Ryan's eyes widen. "Shot? Beckett, what kind of dream were you having?"

Kate scrapes a hand through her hair, but - no, it couldn't have been a dream, could it? No, _no_ , the heat of his body, his mouth on hers, was too real, the horror of confronting Bracken, the ice in her veins too frigid to be imagined.

"It wasn't a dream," she argues. "What are you even doing here?"

"I'm always here late," he says, as if he really is convinced that she's lost it now, but he's the one who sounds ridiculous. "So are you. But I'd kinda hoped that you kicked the habit of crashing on the couch here."

"I have," she mutters, retracting her hand from between her breasts to press her palm to the sofa's arm, push herself up. The December air is always brutal to her scar, the cold seeping into her skin, lacing around the strip of dead tissue and constricting. She expects the familiar ripping sensation to yank mercilessly at her side like it has every day since the chill of winter rolled in, but when she stands, there's... nothing.

Kate moves her hand to the spot below her ribs, unable to feel the the line of raised flesh above her blouse.

"It's gone," she whispers, slipping her fingers beneath the untucked fabric and searching her skin, smooth and unmarred. It's been three years since she was stabbed, the wound has healed, but it definitely hasn't disappeared.

Ryan eyes her warily. "What's gone?"

"My - my scar," she breathes, her chest tightening with panic. What the hell is going on? "From the stab wound."

"Beckett," Ryan begins slowly. "Why don't you head home for a couple of hours, grab a shower and maybe something to eat? A midnight snack?"

She wants to protest, snap at Ryan for looking at her like she's crazy, but well, maybe she is.

Kate swallows and takes a step towards her desk, but it wasn't a dream. It can't be.

"Yeah, okay," she concedes, because she isn't going to get any answers, isn't going to figure anything out, with Ryan eyeing her like she's become unhinged.

"And Beckett?"

She pauses, her fingers curling around the top of her desk drawer, where her purse still hopefully resides.

"Were you talking about Rick Castle, the author?"

Her heart leaps.

"Yes." But... since when does Ryan refer to Castle as if he's a stranger?

"So, you were dreaming about your celebrity crush, huh? Cute." Ryan smirks and turns to leave, but her brow only furrows deeper.

Her celebrity crush? Why is he talking about Castle like he doesn't even know him, like _she_ doesn't know him?

* * *

Kate walks home, hoping the cold will snap her senses back into place, clear her mind of whatever delusions she's apparently suffering, but all she gains from the trek to her apartment is a pulling pain between her breasts, her body remembering even if she apparently doesn't.

The key to her apartment still works, she was afraid she would have to go back to the precinct, find a way to ask without being obvious (and blatantly insane) where the hell she lives now. But she has greater concerns than her living situation, than Ryan thinking she's gone mental. Kate digs her cellphone from her bag, her heart pounding in her fingertips as she searches for his name in her contacts.

She scrolls through the C's, the R's, but Castle's name isn't there, his contact information missing. Even in the years they spent apart, she never deleted his number from her phone.

Kate growls and presses the heel of her palm to her forehead. She's lost, confused, her chest is aching, and she doesn't know where he is. Hell, she doesn't know where _she_ is only that it's all wrong.

She should follow Ryan's suggestion, take a shower, eat something, but instead, she turns around, opening the door she just closed. He would never leave the loft.

Whatever's going on here, she'll find out once she finds him.

She hails a cab this time, the bones of her fingers cramping from the cold, frozen around her phone. The date on her screen is the same as she remembers, December 23rd, the year correct as well. Maybe she really did fall asleep on the couch in her office, dream the book party, her time with him, the nightmare of William Bracken's intrusion. Maybe that was all a dream, a premonition she can turn to reality.

Kate pays the cabbie with a few bills from her wallet and steps out onto the sidewalk in front of his building. The doorman greets her with a nod and that has to mean something, right? That Ernie is letting her through the entry without any form of hesitation, like she's been here before?

Surely the badge on her hip has nothing to do with it.

She takes the elevator to his floor, her heart lurching in her chest as the lift comes to a halt and the doors slide open. She hasn't been inside his apartment in years.

Kate swallows hard and reaches for the chain around her neck. Her fingers reflexively fiddle with the ring attached, relieved it's still there, trapped beneath the turtleneck she was apparently wearing yesterday. She forces out a breath and steps out of the elevator before the doors close on her, on the hallway that leads to his front door.

Even if the progress she dreamed of didn't happen, it's okay. She can _make_ it happen.

 _I just want you._

The courage flares in her gut and she hastens her step to his door, knocking on the hard surface with far more confidence than she feels.

It takes a moment, but she hears the footsteps on the other side, the click of the lock on the other side. The door swings open and-

Kate's lips part on the girl's name, but her mouth has gone mute.

"A-Alexis," she stumbles out, blinking past the surprise of his daughter's altered appearance.

Alexis narrows her eyes on Beckett, not necessarily a bad sign. She wasn't Kate's biggest fan the last time they saw each other either. "Yeah?"

"Wow, you look - your hair, it looks great," Kate gets out, undoubtedly butchering her chances of making amends with his daughter with every stunted word that comes out of her mouth.

Alexis's brow furrows and his daughter crosses her arms over her chest. The dark hair places even more emphasis on her eyes, sharpening them to an icy blue that freezes Kate to the spot.

"I'm sorry, who are you?"

Kate's heart begins to sink. Not her too.

"Alexis, I - I know it's been a few years since we last saw each other, but I'm - Detective Beckett?" she adds when the girl - young woman - simply stares back at her with not a hint of recognition.

But her eyes do flash to her hip, the badge clipped to her slacks, and some of the tension from her shoulders, the defensive posture, loosens just slightly.

"You're looking for my dad, aren't you?" she sighs, striking a match of relief in Kate's chest, but the disappointment in Alexis's gaze threatens to smother it on sight.

"Yeah, actually, do you know where I can find him?"

"I'm not even going to ask what he did this time," Alexis mutters, leaving Beckett in the open doorway as she turns on her heel, starts towards the kitchen.

Kate takes a reluctant step after her, but pauses the second she's inside.

"Whoa," she whispers, her eyes roaming the lavish loft that is so... not Castle.

"Nice place, huh?" Alexis asks, leaning over the island with a pad and pen. "I liked it better before my Gram redid it, it was more chill, but-" His daughter shrugs, scribbling across the paper and ripping it from its bindings. "It comes in handy whenever I'm in town."

"In town?" Kate repeats, studying the sharp contrast in style from the welcoming environment she once knew. It used to be warm, rich with earth tones, cozy furniture. There used to be abundant amounts of space, his books once owned the walls of shelves, and family photos claimed every flat surface, but now... every wall is covered in extravagant wallpaper, every space crammed with obscure statues, and the chandelier overtaking the living room is sparkling too bright for the late night hour.

Even the Christmas tree that springs to the ceiling is the opposite of what she would have expected - the only decoration in the apartment and it's as generic as they come. Castle always loved Christmas, regaling her in that sole year of working together with his tales of decorating with Alexis every year, going out of his way to make it magical. But this isn't magic, not the kind he spoke of.

His home has always been so inviting, _chill_ , like his daughter described. This is the opposite of chill. This is loud, this is - Martha.

"Yeah, I live in LA, but I flew in to see my Gram's big performance of the year," Alexis explains with a roll of her eyes, returning with the paper held out to Beckett. "He's having a book party a few blocks from here. It's probably still going on."

Kate accepts the paper, but her mind is hung up on Alexis's mention of living in LA, her talk of the book party.

"Mind if I ask what book?"

Alexis glances over her shoulder, peering at a coffee table with claw feet in the living room and the book thrown atop it like an afterthought.

" _Finite Laughter_?" she reads aloud, returning her attention to Kate with a shrug. "Gram told me it bombed, which is why he's having the release party so close to Christmas. Smart marketing move."

"Bombed? But he - what about Derrick Storm? Nikki Heat?" Kate asks, folding the paper in her hands to stop them from shaking.

Something in Alexis's eyes dulls, the ice melting into a murky blue.

"Derrick Storm was the last character successful character he ever wrote and that was... years ago, while I was still in high school," she recalls with a twist of her lips, the disappointment in her gaze strengthening. "I've never heard of Nikki Heat, though. You may have him confused with another author."

Her heart cracks, splintering down the middle.

"Maybe so," she concedes, studying the ripped square of paper in her palm.

The address is the same.

"Hey, Detective?" Kate's gaze snaps back to Alexis, so much older, in ways that go beyond age. The black of her hair helps with that, but it's more than the disappearance of her signature red strands. It's the frown lines carved into parenthesis around her mouth, the subtle smudges of purple beneath her eyes, the sadness that inhabits her features. The same kind of sorrow that comes with growing up too fast. "When you find him, tell him his daughter said she'll see him sometime next year."

Alexis reaches to close the door, but Kate's catching it before she can.

"Wait, you're leaving? But - Christmas Eve is tomorrow," she points out, because no matter what, she knows without doubt that it would break Castle's heart to spend Christmas without his daughter.

Alexis sighs, the frown lines deepening. "It's been a long time since my dad and I have spent Christmas together, Detective Beckett."

Kate releases the door, allowing Alexis to proceed in easing it closed.

"I hope you get what you need from him, have a good night."

"I - thanks," Kate manages just before his daughter clicks the door shut, locking it, and disappearing with the sound of her footsteps on the other side.

But Beckett remains planted to the spot outside his front door, the paper crinkling in her hands. The Rick Castle she knows would never forgive himself for putting that look on his daughter's face, the Castle she knows would never let Alexis leave before Christmas. He would never let her leave, period.

What kind of man is waiting for her at the book party?

* * *

The strange sense of deja vu sweeping over her as she emerges from yet another taxi that night is unsettling. The first time she stepped out of a cab to attend his book party what felt like mere hours ago, hope and tentative excitement swirled in her stomach. It's replaced by cold dread drenching her insides now.

Kate tries to breathe past the nausea consuming her chest while she approaches the building's entrance, snagging the badge from her waist when a security guard straightens at her presence.

"Captain Beckett, NYPD," she states to the balding man that towers over her, pushing her shoulders back and glaring up at him. "I need to speak with a person on the premises, specifically at Richard Castle's book party, immediately."

"Who?" he asks and Kate arches an eyebrow.

"That's confidential," she lies, watching in satisfaction as the man grudgingly steps aside, allows her to stride past the velvet rope.

"Party's on the top floor," the guard grumbles, but she's already headed straight for the elevator, punching the button for the roof.


	4. Chapter 4

The elevator doors open to a sea of people, mingling, dancing, drinking. Hardly what she would expect from a book party. The roof is protected from the dropping temperatures by a glass enclosure that arches over the building, trapping the warmth from space heaters placed strategically across the rooftop inside.

It's a beautiful setting, the same red, green, and gold beams she remembers lighting up the sky glowing through the space, but up close and personal, it's about as glamorous as she would have expected. She was lucky she caught him mid-escape last time, able to talk to him in the open night air instead.

She can barely breathe in here, can't even hear herself think past the blaring pop renditions of classic Christmas songs. There's no way she would be capable of having a serious conversation with him in a place like this.

Kate squeezes through the crowds, maneuvering her way to the bar, a sanctuary amidst the madness, and gestures for the bartender.

The man approaches her with a charming smile and a bottle of liquor already in his hands.

"You're a vodka girl, I can tell," he grins, waving the bottle of alcohol at her.

"Not tonight. I'm looking for someone," she answers impatiently, attempting to use her new vantage point to canvass the space with her gaze.

"And who's that, gorgeous?"

Kate rolls her eyes. "The author of the book you're all celebrating."

The bartender hitches his brow, clueless.

"Richard Castle," she elaborates, fisting her hands atop the bar, but the man shrugs.

"Is that who the party's for?"

Kate sighs and looks around, stretching for the display of books only a few feet away and flipping the hardcover over. Sure enough, there's a photo of him on the other side, not one she recognizes, but her heart still eases at her first glimpse of him since she awoke alone and confused in this upside down reality.

"Him," she states, showing him Castle's dust jacket photo.

"Oh, _him._ " The bartender points across the room to what looks like a private lounge area, a cluster of white couches and sparkling silver Christmas trees closed off with a curtain made of twinkling lights near the roof's edge. "Pretty sure dude's been chilling over there all night. At least, that's where the drinks he's been ordering end up going."

"Thanks," she mumbles, taking off in determination across the room, ignoring the bartender calling after her with the temptation of free shots.

She's jostled amidst the crowd, drunken dancers stumbling into her and candy cane scented liquor filling her nostrils, but Kate doesn't stop until she's pushing past the strings of Christmas lights. Nothing separates this scene from the party aside from a useless barrier of white and gold lights, but it's calmer on this side of the building, far less people and activity.

She searches the faces for him, recognizing Patterson and Connelly, a few other authors she's known to endorse him in the past, but her eyes don't land on Castle until she looks to the sofa farthest from her point of entry. Secluded from everyone else and closest to the roof's edge.

But it's him. Red shirt, fitted black suit jacket, slacks - he looks as dashing as she remembers, but he's sitting alone, nursing a drink in his hand, and staring out into the city past the barrier of glass. Not quite as ruggedly handsome when he looks so sad.

Kate sucks in a breath and uses her long legs to demolish the distance between them, her heels clicking on the concrete rooftop, her heart pounding in time with her pace.

"Excuse me." Kate's wrenched to a stop by a Jersey accent and sharp nails pinching around her arm. "Who gave you the authority to-"

"I _am_ the authority," she snaps, shrugging out of the woman's grasp and raising her badge again, abusing her shield for the sake of him. "I'm here to speak with Richard Castle."

The other woman's eyebrows rise and - oh, she knows who this is now. Paula, Rick's overbearing agent.

"Should I be calling his lawyer, Miss..."

"Captain Beckett. And no, I just have a few questions," she explains, her voice steady and smooth in an attempt to calm Paula's sudden paranoia. She doesn't remember his agent being quite as involved the last time she approached him at a book party and dragged him down to the station.

"Well, _Captain_ , I hate to tell you-"

"Paula." Kate's head snaps towards the sound of his voice. He's rising from the couch, approaching the two of them.

Her heart jerks with hope. Maybe everything around them is wrong, the world she knew upside down, but maybe he still-

Castle flicks his eyes to her, quirking his lips, but it isn't the genuine, crooked smile she's grown to love. It's the inviting smirk of a smarmy playboy she once couldn't stand.

"I have no problem speaking with Captain Beckett."

Paula rolls her eyes. "Rick-"

"Paula," he counters, sharing a look with the woman until she inevitably backs down with a growl in her throat and a pivot of her heel. The mischievous grin is back in place and her heart descends impossibly deeper, crashing from her chest into pit of her stomach, stinging in the acid. "Sorry about that."

He's staring straight at her, intrigue alight in his gaze, but just like with Alexis, there's not a hint of recognition. Nothing but the sparkle of lust in his dull blue eyes. Just another conquest.

When she fails to respond, he tilts his head, toning down the charm and replacing it with a more welcoming smile, one he would use to greet a guest or a fan. But still a stranger.

"So, what brings you to my book party, Captain?"

Her heart is throbbing, bruising her ribs with every crashing collision of beats, breaking her. She just wants him back. She just _got_ him back.

"Castle, you don't - you don't know me?" she asks, her voice damn near cracking over the question, on the verge of convincing another person that she's lost her mind.

His brow creases, some of the playboy persona falling away to make room for the concern that creeps into his gaze.

"I think I would remember knowing you, Captain," he states, the corner of mouth curling and she growls, can't take any more of it.

"Stop that," she hisses, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"Stop what?" She can hear the confusion in his voice, but it's tinted with amusement that only serves to infuriate her further.

"Being..." She waves a hand over his face. "Fake."

"Excuse me?" Oh, he didn't like that. Kate lowers her hand to see the irritation wiping the playful grin from his lips and she's glad for it. She can deal with irritation, with anger, with actual emotion. "You don't even know me, how can you call me fake?"

"Because I _do_ know you and this isn't you," she argues under her breath, glaring up at him, close enough to watch some of the mask disintegrate, the guard in his gaze crumbling. "Not anymore."

"Is there someone I should call for you?" he asks instead of answering.

"No," she sighs, tries a softer approach. She's walking a fine line, a step away from coming off as a crazy fan - god knows he's had enough of those to recognize the signs. "Rick, you have to listen to me."

He hesitates, his throat bobbing with a swallow, but he doesn't deny her, doesn't turn her away. She starts before he can change his mind.

"I don't know what happened, how it happened," she murmurs, forcing him to lean towards her to catch her words. The scent of his aftershave, the subtle accompaniment of his cologne, leaves her a little breathless. "But we were - together. We'd been together, working together, for years, but then after I was stabbed and my captain was killed-"

"You were stabbed?" he questions, eyebrows rocketing to his hairline before his eyes drop to her body, pointlessly searching for the site of the injury that doesn't even seem to exist in this... this _world_. "Are you okay? How long ago was this?"

"Three years ago, I'm fine. But we stopped talking for about two years-"

"Two years? Ouch," he mumbles and she sighs, torn between heartache and exasperation.

"But you never stopped inviting me to your book parties, never stopped writing about me," she murmurs, dropping her gaze to her shoes even though this version of Castle has no idea what she's talking about. "I was tired of missing you, wondering 'if only'," she muses, sucking in a breath through her nose before returning her attention to his face. He looks as if he's holding his breath, captivated, and hope flares bright in her chest. Maybe she just has to remind him. "So I came to your book party, this party, but you were running... getting some fresh air and I ran into you on the street. We got coffee and we were talking and then Bracken showed up-"

"Wait, William Bracken? As in the senator?" he questions, as if _that's_ the craziest part of all this.

"It's a long story," she affirms, feeling the stares on them beginning to gather. Curious glances from fellow authors, a death glare from Paula, and a few flashes of a camera going off in the corner of her vision and spiking her blood with adrenaline.

"I want to hear it."

"What?" Her attention snaps back to him. There's still a touch of wariness to his features, she can't blame him, but the desire to know, to hear the rest of her story, overwhelms any doubts he may have about her, her sanity.

"You're a police captain, right?" Her lips part, but all she manages is a nod. "And you had to be a detective first to reach that ranking?"

Her body thrums with memories of her days as a detective, the year she spent with him at her side, building theory and want inside her.

"So, you must be smart enough to realize that the book this party is for sucks."

She blinks. "I - haven't read it."

"Don't bother," he mutters, reaching behind him for the black pea coat thrown across the top of the sofa. "I haven't written a good story in years, Captain. Haven't heard one either."

"So you want mine?"

He turns back to her while he shoves his arms through the sleeves of the coat. Something flickers in his eyes, illuminating the clouded greys of his irises, like the dance of lightning in the distance. The promise of a storm.

"I do," he confirms, offering his arm to her, but she hesitates. "I'd rather listen to whatever you have to say than stick around here anyway. If it sweetens the deal any, I'll buy you a coffee."

She huffs, but the churning worry in her gut fails to cease. This Castle is alive and well, but what about hers? What about the man she left in the middle of a battle with Bracken? Is he safe, is he injured, is he _alive_? But like the Castle holding his arm out to her now just said, she was a detective, still maintains the skills to investigate. She needs to put her talents to the test and find her way back home, back to the Castle who needs her. The one she needs just as badly.

This version of him could potentially help her get there.

Kate curls her fingers in the crook of his elbow, feels the familiar current of electricity course through her veins, sizzle in her fingertips. He must feel it too, because his eyes flash to her hand, trailing up her arm to study her face once more. He looks startled, unnerved by her, but quickly covers it with a blink of his eyes and smirk of his lips.

"Has anyone ever told you that you have gorgeous eyes, Captain?"

She holds back her frown.

"Yeah, once."


	5. Chapter 5

Kate nudges him in the opposite direction of the previous coffee shop they visited, the one that eventually led to their potential demise, making them walk an extra couple of blocks in the cold. It's worth it if it keeps him alive.

"So, back there, at the book party, I was getting the cliff notes version," he muses, approaching the booth she chose in the back corner, away from any windows, with two cups of coffee.

"I was kind of in a rush," she shrugs, accepting the to go cup with a murmur of appreciation. "I was on the verge of being kicked out."

"Oh, I wouldn't have kicked you out." He sits down across from her, hot coffee cradled between his palms. "I know crazy comes in all forms, even hot women, but you don't have that psychotic gleam in your eye."

She arches her brow at him. "You would know?"

"Apparently, you would too, considering you know me so well," he counters, sipping at his coffee with a smug curl of his lips, proud of himself for the clever barb.

"I don't think many people would need to know you personally to be aware of your crazy fans, Castle."

"Not so crazy anymore," he murmurs. "Actually, encountering a fan of mine is a pretty rare occasion these days."

He's not bitter, nor disappointed, but... ashamed?

"Why's that?" she prompts, soaking up the warmth from the cardboard cup between her palms.

Castle hesitates, hiding his gaze from her beneath his lashes and pursing his lips. "Derrick Storm was the last decent piece of literature I ever wrote and that was six, closing in on seven, years ago. That book party you found me at... I had to _pay_ people to come."

Her heart clenches. Shame is definitely the prominent emotion drenching his features and she wants to reach across the table between them, smooth away the crease of his brow and the frown on his lips with the comforting sweep of her fingers.

"What happened after Derrick?" she asks instead.

"I just... lost it," he murmurs, shaking his head. "The inspiration to write, the desire to, and with that went everything else."

"Alexis," she exhales thoughtlessly, earning the immediate lift of his gaze.

"How do you know my daughter?" he questions, a hint of defense, protectiveness in his voice that provides her with a shot of reassurance. Even if their relationship doesn't seem to be as sound in this world, the love for his daughter is still there, just as intense, just a little quieter.

"Well, in my version of things, I met her the same night I met you six years ago," she explains, bridging her fingers to tighten her grip on the cup, steady herself. "But here, I just met her a few hours ago. I went to the loft looking for you, she answered the door."

Castle relaxes a little. "That's how you found me."

"Yeah, she was helpful. Always been helpful, but she... used to have red hair," she states, dumbly, but it has something gentle and reminiscent swimming to the surface of Castle's features.

"She did," he nods, dropping his gaze back to the table. "The black is nice, but it uh, makes her look older. Makes me miss her a little more."

"Why do you have to miss her?" He glances up to her, brow knit again. "I mean, she's at the loft right now. She told me she was leaving soon. Tell her to stay."

"I can't," he sighs, grumbles. "She doesn't want to."

"Why?" Kate presses, the sorrow in Alexis's eyes flashing in her mind. Reuniting Castle with his daughter, mending their broken relationship in this reality, is not her objective, but she can't stand the memory of a daughter looking so disappointed in her father. She's been there, knows the feeling too well. "Castle, Christmas is three days away and it's your favorite-"

"How would you-" His sentence trails and his gaze narrows on her. "What else do you supposedly know?"

Her eyes roll, because, whether he believes her or not, they've been over this. "I told you-"

"Prove it."

She grits her teeth. This Castle is a bolder, willing to push harder than her writer typically would. This one doesn't hold back, doesn't handle her with any kind of tentativeness; he has no reason to.

"Cheeseburgers are your favorite food."

His eyes flash, her assumption correct, but he shrugs.

"Anyone could guess that. Try again."

Kate tears her eyes from him, wracking her brain for a secret, a conversation they shared that contained information only she could know, that he would only tell someone he trusts.

"You raised Alexis all on your own," she states the fact with returning confidence, watching him sit back, unimpressed. Too easy, but she isn't done. "You and Meredith were young, but you wanted to make it work, raise Alexis together, but after you caught her cheating with her director, I think it was? You called it quits and took on the responsibility of parenting that little girl on your own."

She surprises herself a little with the details of that one, relieved she was able to recover the memory of him arriving to a crime scene, dropping the truth about Meredith cheating on him like it was nothing. It became more apparent over her time in knowing him just how deep that wound cut, how it motivated him even more to dedicate his whole being into being the best dad for Alexis.

"Your first love was your college sweetheart," she murmurs, feels the ridiculous remnants of jealousy resumed from dormancy in the pit of her stomach. She hated that case. "Kyra Blaine."

 _He's all yours._

His throat bobs with a swallow. Right again.

She's running out of personal information to draw from the top of her head, stories and facts that no one else could know or obtain from the media; all she has left is the truth.

"You have a good heart," she says softly. "You let your mother move in with you when she had nothing. I don't know what changed there, how she's suddenly taken over the loft," she murmurs, creasing her brow as the picture of his altered home flickers in her mind. It elicits a strangled huff of laughter from him, a tired smile that reels her heart to press against the cage of her ribs, encourages her to continue. "Alexis could sometimes seem like the more mature of the two of you, like she was the one parenting you, but you would do anything for her, in my world and in this one." He doesn't speak, doesn't disagree, his eyes cerulean and intent on her, waiting, wanting her to keep going. "Just like you would do anything for me."

"What have I done for you, Captain Beckett?" he asks, the tease she would have expected fifteen minutes ago gone, only the need to know burning in his gaze.

She swallows hard, tampers down the needful throb of her heart in her chest, the affection and longing splicing through her sternum.

"You wrote books that kept me afloat when I was drowning," she confesses, a secret he knew neither in this life or the last. "You brought me coffee every morning." Her fingertips trace the lid of her cup, the coffee inside untouched and probably going cold. "You ran into a burning building to pull me out of it."

His brow rises at that one and her lips quirk.

"Yeah, you're kind of an idiot too."

"Saving you doesn't sound too idiotic," he counters, but he's not saying it because it's _her_ , she reminds herself. There's still a hint of flirtation to his tone and that isn't him, not when he's with her, not when they talk like this and she's spilling her soul to him.

"You put up one hundred thousand dollars just for a shot at catching the man who killed my mother," she whispers, wiping his face clean of everything else to elicit a full sweep of horror through his features.

"Someone killed your mother?"

"That's another story entirely," she murmurs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "The point, Castle, is that you're a good man and I know that because I know _you_."

He still looks wholly unbalanced, shaken by the revelation of her dead mother, the lack of reasoning he has to deny her.

"I - I guess I can't argue with that last part," he gets out. "So this... you're not pitching me a story."

"Not a fictional one," she murmurs, finally lifting the coffee to her lips, grimacing at the lukewarm temperature.

"Okay." Castle runs a hand through his hair before folding both in front of him, propping his chin atop his knuckles. "Tell me again how you got here. Start from the beginning."

* * *

They stay at the coffee shop, Castle leaning over the table, enraptured by every word that comes out of her mouth, for over an hour, until it's past two a.m. and the staff is asking them to leave.

The streets are still alive with activity, the sky alight with the city's nightlife and the air thick with Christmas music spilling out of various buildings. She considers suggesting they walk back to his loft, but the winter air slices through her blazer with its soft breeze, sends a sharp shiver down her spine. She didn't think to dress appropriately for any of this, leaving the precinct without looking for a coat, exiting her apartment in the same fashion.

Castle notices.

"Jeez, you must be freezing," Rick murmurs, shrugging out of his pea coat to drape it over her shoulders before she can protest.

Kate sighs, lets the faded scent of his deodorant and the remnants of his warmth clinging to the fabric embrace her.

"Thanks," she murmurs, watching him step to the edge of the sidewalk, hold his arm out for a cab.

He can't be much warmer without it, his suit jacket made of rich material no doubt, but not thick enough to keep him warm. A cab is already pulling to a stop in front of him before she can insist he take it back, though, and he turns to her with his eyes bright and impatient, eager to hear the rest of her story.

He holds the door open for her, promptly sliding in after and asking the driver to crank up the heat. Castle maintains his distance, inches between them in the backseat of the taxi, and she's grateful.

She just kissed him for the first time minutes before her world went dark and left her to wake in this one. The idea of flirting with another man, even if it is Castle himself, just a different version, makes her head spin in all the worst ways. She can still feel the heat of his mouth on hers, can hear the sound of his moan infusing her senses with fire; Kate fists her fingers, buries them in her coat pocket. If she would have let him love her all along, just said it back that day at Montgomery's funeral, she would have the taste of his mouth memorized by now, the sensation of his body sealing against hers. Instead, she's left to mourn something she may never get back.

"So, after your captain was killed-"

"Castle," she quiets him on a huff. The cab driver isn't paying them any attention, looks as if he couldn't care less what they're doing back here, but discussing Roy's death in public, in front of anyone outside of the immediate family that the man sitting beside her knows nothing about, feels explicably wrong to her.

"Do you think he could be alive here?" Castle whispers, picking up from where they left off in the coffee shop, and a devastating kind of hope leaks through her chest.

Could Montgomery be alive in this universe?

"I don't know," she admits, resting her back against the seat and staring dazedly down at her knees. "I didn't think it was possible, but if he died because of me in my world, then maybe here-"

"It wasn't because of you," Castle argues, triggering more treacherous hope inside of her. But when she meets his eyes in the darkness of the cab, she can see that he's only offering her the answer any good friend would. This Castle wasn't with her when it happened, when Lockwood and his men drove up as Rick was hauling her away from certain death, when the gunshots rang through the night air while Castle held her until the final shot was fired and Montgomery was gone. This one doesn't _know_.

"He could still be alive," is all she says, casting her gaze to the window. Snow is starting to fall, white flurries cascading through the night to cling to buildings and Christmas decorations, threatening to stick and paint New York white for Christmas.

"Do you want him to be?" Castle asks and her brow furrows, the answer obvious.

She would never want Montgomery dead, regardless of the role he played in her mother's murder. He was her mentor, a man she loved like a father, the father she lost to a bottle for a few years. But this Castle isn't aware of her past, not yet, and she's not keen on telling him unless she has to.

"I wanted to save him that night," she murmurs, shrugging her shoulders to bury her body deeper in his coat. "I never wanted him to die, so if he's alive here..." She thinks of his family, Evelyn's body bowing over in grief at his funeral, his two girls with tears streaking down their faces as their father was put in the ground. "I'm glad."

Kate glances to him from the corner of her eye, watching him absorb the information with a thoughtful expression.

"Would you want to see him?"

She purses her lips, contemplating for herself. "I don't know. He wouldn't give me a name, but I have it. Maybe it's best to just leave him out of it this time, let him live."

"William Bracken," Castle mumbles under his breath, rolling the name around in his mouth. "I'm glad I didn't vote for him."

A chuckle slips past her lips, but the mention of votes reminds her, has her stomach tightening in its endless fist of dread.

"He's going to run for president," she sighs, scraping a hand through her hair, digging her nails into the back of her neck. She wishes that part was a dream, part of this world instead of hers.

"What?" Castle hisses, leaning towards her. "He can't do that."

"With all the truth covered up," she mutters, catching sight of his building coming into view. "He can."

"We can stop it, there has to be a way-"

"Castle, I have to get back to you in _my_ world," she whispers, reaching for her pocket for cash as they slow to a stop in front of his building. But Rick is already paying the man and pushing open the door, waiting impatiently for her to follow.

She huffs, but has no choice, heaving her door open and stepping out onto the sidewalk beside him.

"Yeah, but maybe we can find a way to stop him here _and_ there," he reasons, leading her to the front entrance of his lobby. "We could talk to your old captain, or find that Smith guy. Do you think that deal Montgomery made exists here too?"

"It has to," she murmurs, striding to the elevator with him. The lobby is cold, ridden with night air from its open door, and she's so sick of freezing, just wants to be warm. "I must have found a way to let it go here, so if I didn't keep digging into my mom's case, then Bracken wouldn't have a reason to come after me."

Castle steps into the elevator after her, leaning back against the wall facing her. "What if it's because you never met me?" he murmurs, crossing his arms over his chest, trying and failing to conceal the frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. "In your... world, it sounds like you were doing okay until I dragged you back down that hole of obsession. So, if you never met me here, maybe that's what kept you on the straight and narrow this long."

"And if you never would have met me, you wouldn't be facing probable death at the hands of William Bracken in my world right now," she counters, mimicking his posture and crossing her arms as the elevator begins to ascend to his floor.

Josh tried to tell her multiple times how it was all Castle's fault Montgomery was dead, how it was Castle's fault she was investigating her mother's murder again, but she never believed that, never agreed. Castle may have lit the match, but she would have found her way back into the flames on her own sooner or later, regardless of the world they're in.

"I wreck _your_ life, Castle," she murmurs, pressing her elbows into her ribs to stop the ache beginning to thrum through her. "If I wouldn't have gone to find you at the book party tonight, none of this ever would have happened." She swallows hard, tears threatening to well in her eyes. "What if no matter where I find you, no matter how we're together, I always lead us to destruction?" she whispers, the realization flushing through her like ice water, crippling her heart with cold.

 _Maybe we're not supposed to be in each other's lives for a reason._

As long as she was around him, he would always suffer the consequences of her damage, he would always die.

"Kate." He takes a step towards her and she jerks back, her spine slamming into the elevator's railing. He doesn't know her, he doesn't understand- "I know we - _this_ version of me just met you, but just from these last few hours of talking with you - and if I know anything about myself - I'd say you're worth the risk."

"Nothing is worth your life," she hisses, covering her face with her hands. "Nothing is worth that, Castle. Ever. And because of me, because of us, because I'm selfish, you might be _dead_. Killed by the man who murdered my mother and I can't-" Her voice catches, hitching on a sob that has his brow creasing deep with concern, his eyes flaring with an ache for her that he shouldn't have, not here. Her lip shakes and Kate presses a hand to her mouth, squeezes her eyes shut. She can't cry in front of him, can't lose it like this. She can't, she can't, but- "I want to go home."

"Kate," he whispers, his voice so soft and soothing, his hands warm as they touch her shoulders with such gentleness. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, but we'll get you back home, okay? Don't cry," he consoles, long arms banding around her, tugging her into his chest. And she lets him because she _needs_ it, needs him.

She buries her nose in the warm cove of his throat, her face crumpling against his skin, and trembles as he brushes his hand up and down her back.

"We'll get you back to the other version of me."

A garbled laugh makes its way up her throat and she can practically feel him smiling.

"You realize how crazy that sounds?" she rasps, lifting a hand between them to wipe at her eyes.

"I do, but you're not crazy," he murmurs, settling his hand at her nape like the anchor she so desperately needs. "I believe you."


	6. Chapter 6

The mysterious woman from another world, another time, _Kate_ , pulls away from him with tear stained cheeks. It chips away at his heart and he can't pinpoint exactly why, only that she's far too beautiful to look so heartbroken, grief stricken. Apparently all because of him.

Another him. So weird.

But he meant it when he told her he believes her. How else could the knowledge she has, his secrets and story, the information about a state senator, be explained? She's not some crazy fan - he's met enough in his lifetime to recognize both the telltale signs and those that are buried beneath the surface - and she's not creative enough to make it all up. No, she really is a police captain, he's shadowed detectives in the past and she carries herself with the same posture and mannerisms he memorized. And not only that, but her recollection of how they met, their brief partnership, and the way he loved her - it's all too real, all too like him (or at least, who he could have been had he not developed into the loser he is in this life) to be fake.

He believes her, believes every word that's left her lips, and her truths are terrifying.

And maybe a little devastating too, in a selfish way. He's kind of jealous that some other version has this gorgeous and intelligent woman so determinedly in love with him. He just met her and he's already fascinated, dreading the moment she leaves. But she can't stay here, not when his other self may be in mortal danger that she blames herself for, not when her heart is tied to a reality that isn't his own.

The elevator doors slide open and Kate sucks in a breath, that single inhale steeling her, drawing all of her broken pieces back into place before she can step out into his hallway. Leading them straight into his daughter.

"Alexis." Castle's lips quirk at the sight of her by reflex, but flip downwards as soon as he notices her suitcase trailing behind her. "What's going on?"

His not so little girl purses her lips, flicks her eyes to Kate as if for help.

"Detective Beckett, you found him," she mumbles, not exactly looking pleased by the fact.

Ouch.

"Yeah, I did, and he was just telling me on the way here how much he wishes you would stick around for Christmas," Kate answers, glancing back to him over her shoulder with an arch of her brow. Because of course he wants his daughter to stay, and not just for Christmas, but what right does he have to ask that of her when he's the reason she left in the first place?

"I didn't realize you were heading back to LA so soon," he finally pipes up, reluctantly stealing Alexis's attention.

Her blue eyes fall to her shoes. "I just didn't see a reason to stay. You never really enjoy Christmas anymore, Dad. You're kind of a Scrooge."

Double ouch.

"I - I know," he confesses, rubbing a hand to the back of his neck. "I know, Alexis, and I know there's only a couple of days left, but if you wanted to, I'd like to try to be less of a Scrooge this year. I miss the Christmases we used to spend together."

Emotion he hasn't seen in a long time flickers in her gaze, the longing flaring bright blue, but she doesn't give him the immediate affirmation he's hoping for. Instead, Alexis swallows her hopes like he's witnessed her do far too many times in the last few years, and nods her head.

"I guess I can stick around, just for Christmas," she compromises, flexing her fingers around the handle of her suitcase. His daughter's gaze returns to Kate. "He's not under arrest, is he?"

"No," Kate chuckles, but her hand shakes just slightly as she lifts it to brush a strand of hair behind her ear. "I was actually looking for him because I was hoping for his help on a case I'm working. He may be the connection I need to crack it."

Alexis's lips quirk. "Wow, Dad. Actually on the right side of the law this time."

"Ha, ha," he deadpans, but his heart is moving a couple of beats faster because his daughter is actually sparing him a smile and Captain Beckett needs his help.

* * *

Kate insists that he help Alexis carry her bags back up to her room while she sets up a timeline downstairs. His mother is likely to be out all night, her broadway shows and their after parties always running into the early morning hours. They have the time, but he ends up lingering with his daughter for far longer than planned.

It shouldn't take a woman from another dimension to set his priorities straight, but having Kate stir up those aching feelings of nostalgia at the cafe and playing a role in convincing Alexis to stay for Christmas in the hallway just minutes ago reminds him just how much he misses his daughter even when she's here.

"Maybe tomorrow I could grab all of our old decorations from storage," Castle suggests, memories of a little girl with red hair decorating a Christmas tree dancing through his mind. Hers too, if the subtle light in her eyes is any indication.

"We only have two days until Christmas, Dad. Less than that, actually," Alexis reminds him, leaving her suitcase by her closet and plopping down on the edge of her bed. "Wouldn't it be kind of pointless to put all of that stuff up only to take it down a day later?"

"Not if I was doing all of it with you, Pump-" He pauses, hasn't called her that in _years_ , especially when the origin of the nickname, her red hair, has been dyed black. "Maybe I should start calling you my little raven instead."

"Dad," Alexis chuckles, but she's smiling at him and it's the best thing that's happened to him in weeks. This, and meeting Captain Kate Beckett at his disaster of a book party. Quite the night for him. "I missed it too, you know," Alexis adds. "Christmases with you. The - the old you. Before you gave up."

He knows she's not trying to wound him, but it almost makes him wonder why this version of him isn't good enough for anyone.

"I want to fix that too," he murmurs with determination, standing at her bedside with his heart heavy and fighting in his chest. So much to fix - his relationship with his daughter, his writing, his mother's renovation of the loft.

Despite never being inside his home prior to tonight, Kate was right - Martha's taken over the place.

"I know I've dropped the ball these past few years, I know I've let you down, but I want to make things better. I want to _be_ better."

Alexis stares up at him, the way she studies him almost unnerving, but then she's rising from the edge of her bed, stepping into him for a hug. She smudges her cheek to his chest, her head tucked under his chin.

Castle returns her embrace with the tight band of his arms around her.

"I've missed you, Dad."

He presses a kiss to her crown. "Missed you too."

* * *

Kate migrates to his office, taking a seat at his desk and digging through his drawers for pen and paper. She doesn't know where to begin, has no idea how to possibly get back to her own world, what her reason for ending up in this one is, so she starts with what she knows.

She fills a page of his notebook with facts, a timeline. She compares her life, Castle's life, to the changes she's discovered here. But none of it adds up to a solution, to a road back home.

She traces the pen back and forth beneath William Bracken's name. The reason she's here, the reason her mother is dead, the reason Castle may be as well. He's arguably the strongest connection.

"Captain?" The pen drops from her fingers and she lifts her head, disorientated by the sound of his voice calling for her by a title he was never previously familiar with.

"In your office," she calls back, hearing the sound of his footsteps shuffle and redirect from the kitchen.

"Thought you left," he says, trotting in through the office door, the relief shining and prevalent in his eyes. But not as bright as the tentative joy she has a feeling Alexis is responsible for.

"Where would I go?" she muses, mustering a smile for him. "Good talk with Alexis?"

The grin on his lips widens. "We're going to decorate for Christmas tomorrow. I'll have to take down some of my mother's decorations first," he mumbles, eyeing the living room at his back with distaste that twists his smile into a frown. "But we'll put up a tree, deck the halls, all that."

"That's great, Castle," she murmurs, her heart swelling with a good dose of her own relief to see this father and daughter on the path to mending. She tries to keep it from cracking as thoughts of the Alexis from her world, the girl who still has the fiery red hair and doe-eyed innocence that this one lacks, plague her mind. What happens to the Alexis she knows if Castle doesn't make it? If she can't save him?

"Hey, you okay?" he asks, the lines of his face laden with concern for her once more, his short-lived reprieve with his daughter dissipating.

She needs to get back to her own life, away from this Castle before she strips him of everything he has too.

"Yeah, fine, just..." Kate glances back to the legal pad covered in her handwriting. "Not getting anywhere."

"Maybe you need to sleep," he suggests, lowering to the sofa across the room. "I can take you home, or you can stay here. Whatever's more comfortable, helpful."

"Maybe," she concedes, burying her hands in her hair and propping her elbows on his desk. She won't deny that she can feel the exhaustion weighing her down, wrapping around her bones and seeping into her brain, tugging on her eyelids. But how can she possibly sleep?

"You know, Kate, if you can't find your way back home-" Her heart cinches painfully and he automatically raises a hand in supplication. "Not that I don't think you will, I believe in you, I do. But I just wanted you to know that if by some small chance you don't, you have a place here."

Kate sighs, finds a smile for him. "Thank you, Rick."

"But, in the meantime..." He pops up from the couch to snag his laptop from the edge of the desk, allowing her to keep his comfortable office chair. "You keep brainstorming and I'll do as much research as I can on time travel and alternate dimensions."

He sits back on the sofa with earnest, his computer balanced atop his thighs, and she almost wishes she could replace the device, curl up with him, drift to sleep, drift home...

Kate rubs at the spot between her brows, trying to suppress the brewing headache there. This Castle likes her, she can tell, but he has no idea what threading his life through hers entails. He has no idea who she is, has no knowledge of the dark places inside of her that he lit up like with his presence; he doesn't know her coffee order, her favorite comfort food, the thorns twisted around her heart that he untangled.

He hasn't learned just how hard it is to love someone like her. Her own Castle has been battered enough throughout the last four years because of her, but he never let her go and she won't let him go now. Not even for the lookalike with too much anguish in his eyes.

* * *

Kate falls asleep at his desk, bowed over pages torn from the legal pad with her fingers coiled around one of his pens. They sat in comfortable silence for nearly an hour, his face glued to the screen of his laptop while the sound of her scribbling on paper filled the room. He became sucked into theories of alternate realities, traveling through time and space, the potential for life on other planets and galaxies, and the possibility for them to merge. He read it all before he realized the sound of Kate's writing had gone quiet.

Castle pushes his laptop to the side and rises from the sofa, popping his spine as he stands. He grunts, feeling every bit his age these days, and shuffles over to his desk.

"Captain?" he calls softly, circling the wooden surface to touch her shoulder with tender fingers.

She doesn't stir, her body still and the frown on her lips resolute even in sleep.

He curls his fingers around the harsh bone of her shoulder, another thing he's noticed about her. Every part of her is so sharp, her body composed of jagged edges, untouchable. He wonders if she's always been this unattainable or if it was a trait developed over time.

From her timeline of their partnership, the ways they fell apart and came together again like crashing waves, the prior sounds more likely. He really did have to fight for her in the supposed other world she came from, didn't he?

But somehow, without even knowing her, he already knows she's worth it.

"Hey, Kate," he tries again, shaking her gently, but it sends a jolt through her bones.

Her head jerks up, cheek lifting from the notebook beneath. She blinks a few times as her bleary eyes find him, assessing for a long moment before she reaches for him, touches her fingertips to his jaw.

Fire trails slow and pleasant along his skin.

"Castle?" she mumbles. His heart picks up as her thumb skims his bottom lip.

"Not - ah, not your Castle," he clarifies, swallowing hard against the disappointment that coils in his guts with the words and the heat that blooms beneath her fingertip.

"My..." Reality flashes quick and brutal through her clouded eyes, clearing them instantly, and Kate drops her hand back to the desk, returns her head to the hard surface too.

Her shoulders rise with the deep breath she inhales and he's almost afraid she's going to cry, tries to brace himself for it. But her head rises again a moment later and she scrubs her hands over her eyes.

"How long was I out?" she asks, clearing her throat and pushing back from his desk.

He makes room for her to stand, steps aside as she rounds his desk and brushes past him for the living room.

"Maybe half an hour," he answers, scrambling after her. But she isn't leaving like he fears, only making her way to the kitchen, straight for his coffee machine. "Kate, it's four in the morning."

She glances back to him over her shoulder, her eyes pleading, and he automatically draws closer to her.

Shit, she's magnetic.

"I can't sleep, Castle," she murmurs, curling her fingers around the handle of the coffee pot. "I can't. And I have to be at the precinct by seven anyway."

"You're going to work at a time like this?" he asks incredulously.

Kate shrugs. "I doubt I'll get much actual work done, but maybe there are answers in that part of my life. There has to be _something_."

"Okay, but supernatural time and space traveler or not, you aren't superhuman. You need to sleep," he argues, coming up beside her and shooing her hands away from the coffeemaker.

"Just make me coffee with your fancy machine," she mumbles, nudging his hip.

He huffs, but flips open the top of said machine, moves past her for the fridge and the coffee already ground and ready for use.

"Fine, I'll make the coffee. You go sit down before you fall down," he acquiesces, bumping her shoulder and grabbing a mug from the cabinet overhead.

She hums, a welcome change from her usual answers of defiance. Even though he still managed to concede, giving her what she wants, something he has a feeling she's used to with him. Kate shuffles to the breakfast bar, climbing onto the first stool and propping her elbows atop the granite, watching him.

He wants to tease her about checking him out as her eyes follow the movements of his body, but she isn't thinking about _him_ , she's thinking about some other version that he doesn't even come close to comparing to. Despite how much he wants to. He could be the man she loves if she gave him some time, he could be the man he should have been all along, for her and Alexis both.

"Hey, Kate, can I ask you something? For future reference?"

"Future reference?" she repeats with her brow falling into that adorable furrow.

"For when I find you again," he shrugs, putting the coffee beans back in the fridge and setting the machine to brew. "Going off the assumption that there is another you somewhere around here, just like there's another me back in your world."

Her lips quirk, but she's covering her mouth with her fingers, subduing the yawn slipping free. "Good point. What's the question?"

"What was it I did wrong?" The gentle amusement disappears from her face and he's quick to explain. "I just mean - you seemed to like me, in your world, enough to want to go to the Hamptons with me, but not enough to pursue me after that. And I get the thing with Gina must have stung-"

"Castle," she sighs, but he pushes on before she can stop him. It's been a few hours, a single night, but he likes her, really likes Kate Beckett, and if he has to give her up, he damn well wants to do things right when he finds her again. Because he will find her again, the woman he belongs with in this world, he has to.

"I'm sure I would have reacted the same over this Tom guy," he mutters, hearing her chuff with a breath of laughter.

"You kinda did," she mumbles, balancing her chin to her fist. "But stop being jealous over a guy you don't even know and go on."

He growls, leaning into the breakfast bar, directly across from her, mimicking her with his fist below his chin. She has no idea how jealous he is, not of some guy she dated when she should have been dating him, but of himself, the man she loves in another world.

"My point is after you were stabbed…" A touch of darkness extinguishes the gold in her eyes, but he has to keep going, can't stop now. "I know that must have been a bad time too, but I must have still cared, wanted to be with you if I was there for that, if I showed up when your captain called. If I told you I loved you."

Kate bows her head, a quiet sigh slipping into her knuckles.

"It wasn't you, Castle." Her eyes flutter closed for a long moment. "It was nothing you did wrong. I cared about you, I loved you back," she confesses, her words just above a whisper. "But I was afraid. Angry and hurt and hung up on my mother's case..."

"She was your mother, Kate. I'm sure I understood then just like I do now," he reasons, but she shakes her head.

"No, it wasn't that you didn't understand," she murmurs, her lips twitching with the saddest of smiles. "You understood better than anyone, supported me more than anyone else ever could. You were willing to have my back every step of the way, but I just - I took it too far and I wouldn't stop."

"I didn't want you to die," he pieces together, earning a nod of confirmation.

"No, but I stopped caring about whether I died or not," she confesses, lowering her hands to twine them in front of her atop the counter. "I put blinders on and just kept running headfirst into all of it until I made that deal with Bracken. Should've known it could never be that easy."

"It was for a while," he points out, the details of her deal with the senator engrained into his brain like every other piece of the story she's shared.

 _I kept his secret, the evidence of what he'd done, and he left me and those I cared about alone. Until he found out I never had the file, the proof. It was all a lie._

"He was having me followed, having _you_ followed, listening in all along," she whispers, burying her face in her hands. "God, who knows what he heard."

"Good thing we hadn't slept together yet," Castle murmurs, smirking as she peeks between her fingers to glare at him.

"Not what I meant, pervert," she mutters, dropping her hands to splay across the countertop. "My point is that you never gave up on me. I'm the one who led us both to our deaths."

"Hey." He reaches across the bar to cover one of her hands. She stares at the drape of his palm over her knuckles and he expects her to slip her hand from beneath, but Kate simply hooks her thumb around his and simultaneously sets his heart at ease and aflame. "You aren't dead. Neither is he. Well, me. Him-me."

She chuckles, soft and low like the lashes hiding her eyes. "I hope you're right, because it will always be one of my biggest regrets. Not being with you sooner."

She does slip her hand from his then.

"But if you find her after all of this is over with, if you find - me..." She lifts her eyes to meet his, so much compassion and hopefulness blooming in hers. "Don't give up, okay? I'll come around."

"You think so?" he murmurs, trying not to let so much of the need seep into his voice.

"I think I was wrong." Her brow knits, but her lips are in a content curve of a half smile, almost serene in her realization. "I'm supposed to be with you, Rick. And you're supposed to be with me, no matter what world we're in. So yeah, when you find me, don't let me go."

"I won't," he promises, wanting it so badly to be true. Desperate for it to happen.

"Oh, and vanilla lattes. Skim milk, two pumps of sugar free vanilla." He stares back at her. "That's my coffee order."

"I'm supposed to win you over with coffee?"

The corner of her mouth curls. "It goes a long way."


	7. Chapter 7

"Morning, Captain. Feeling better?" Ryan greets, his grin smug, but his eyes still carry leftover worry from last night, when he found her disorientated and in pain on the couch in her office.

She plays it off with a roll of her eyes, bumping his shoulder with her hip as she passes his and Esposito's desk. "Yeah, Ryan. Thanks."

"Oh yeah, Ryan told me about your sweet dreams last night, Beckett," Esposito chimes in, the curve of his lips echoing his partner's. A quip about Lanie bubbles on the tip of her tongue, but... she really doesn't know anything about this Ryan and Esposito, if Lanie and Jenny are in the picture at all. Judging by Ryan's work schedule, she has a feeling she already knows the answer.

He never stayed late when he didn't have to, not when he had Jenny waiting at home for him.

Her chest shudders with another threat to collapse, but she musters a smirk for the boys, continues on her way to her office.

"Better than either of your realities, I'm sure," she tosses over her shoulder, earning their disgruntled protests following her until she eases the door to her office shut.

She doesn't have time for jokes or teasing today. She came here with a mission, a list of names to search the archives for, to see just how far into her mother's case this Kate managed to get.

Beckett descends into her office chair, wiggles the desktop computer to life with her mouse, and types in Dick Coonan's name. Castle wanted to come along, pleading like a little boy until she reminded him of the girl sleeping upstairs with a heart full of hopes for revived Christmas traditions. He didn't argue so much after that.

It's good, good for her. She needs time away from Castle's lookalike, the man who shares his face, probably shares his noble heart and mind as well, but is still so clearly not hers. She sighs while the system loads, casting her gaze across the familiar assortment of knick-knacks and and framed photos, mementos from her mother.

Her index finger trails the parade of elephants, over their trunks and the colorful decorative blankets painted on their backs. Castle used to tease her about them, making note of how they stood out amidst the heavy loads of professionalism always scattered across her desk.

"I like them," he mused, toying with the baby elephant in his hands, tapping the top of his trunk with his thumb. Only a few days after the case with Coonan that nearly got him killed. "They give your desk some character."

"They were my mom's," she murmured, not trying to kill the amused smile on his lips, but it definitely evacuated at the mention of her mother. She didn't want it to be something sad, though, not the sweet little parade of elephants that always made her smile, made her mom feel closer. "Before they were on my desk, she used to keep them on hers. She always said they were like us, me, my mom, my dad. Like a family."

He showed up the next week with a ceramic elephant the half size of his palm.

"He can't join in on the parade," he quipped, placing the elephant on the desk in front of her. "But maybe he can be part of the extended family?"

It wasn't the first time her heart swelled for him, hope and curiosity fluttering tenuously in her chest, because maybe they really could have something.

"He can be part of the family," she smiled, nudging the elephant closer to the rest.

That elephant doesn't exist in this universe and her heart cracks all over again. She grits her teeth as her eyes sting, reaching for the elephants that persistently remain no matter what world she's in.

Kate sits back in her chair, angling away from the slit blinds of her office windows, and cradling the parade of them to her chest. If she has to be stuck in an alternative universe, she wishes her mom was alive in this one. Even in an impossible situation such as this, she'd like to believe her mom would know what to do.

Her thumb nail traces the edge of the largest elephant's blanket, over and over, until it grows loose.

She glances down to the unhinged back of the statue, prepared to pop it back into place, but the hollow space inside the elephant isn't empty like she always thought it was. Her heart begins to pick up speed, but it's probably nothing, can't be...

Kate flips the elephants over, catches the object that falls out of their leader in her palm. She swallows hard as she places the elephants back to her desk, studies the cassette tape in her palm. A tape that apparently belonged to her mother.

Her mind flashes back to the notebooks she's been over a million times, the coded messages Johanna developed in law school that only she could understand. No one was ever able to decipher those notes in her appointment book, but the one about family always stuck with her, nagged at her like a sore spot. The words ring like a riot in her head now.

 _They were like a family._

Kate closes her fist around the tape and stumbles out of her chair. There's a tape player downstairs in storage that they've used for evidence before.

* * *

Skim latte, two pumps of sugar-free vanilla. He has it memorized from the moment she says it and places her order with relish at the coffee shop on his way to the Twelfth precinct. He's never been to this station before, only the 54th, where he shadowed a robbery detective for a couple of weeks, and the 8th during that brief period where he was intrigued by narcotics for an angle in his Derrick Storm novels. But never the homicide division.

Castle walks up to the building's entrance just as Kate Beckett is striding out.

"Whoa," he breathes, nearly getting plowed into.

Kate catches him by the shoulders, her cheeks pink and her eyes red. He almost drops the coffees in his haste to touch her, his instinct to comfort her somehow, but she's already pulling back.

"What happened?" he murmurs, offering her the coffee anyway.

She glances down, bewildered, but accepts the to go cup with fingers that shake. "I found the tape."

"A tape?" he repeats, his brow succumbing to the inevitable furrow of confusion. "What tape?"

Kate takes a long swig of the coffee, something like affection sweeping over her face, before her eyes flicker back to him.

"Rick, it's Christmas Eve," she states, as if he isn't already aware. "You're supposed to be decorating with-"

"Alexis is at the loft, finishing up her breakfast," he nods, cupping both hands around his coffee to refrain from reaching out to drape a hand at her waist. "I have to go pick up the stuff from storage, but I let her know that I was going to drop by to see you. In the meantime, she's going to attempt to start removing some of my mother's decor."

Kate huffs a quiet laugh and starts forward, checking over her shoulder, as if expecting him to follow. He falls into step beside her, not sure of the destination, but willing to follow for as long as she'll allow.

"The tape?" he prompts, witnessing a hard flash of grief clap like lightning over her face. "Kate?"

"Of Bracken," she whispers, her eyes unseeing. He takes her elbow, solely to ensure she doesn't lose her way. "Before he was a senator, back when he was assistant DA, admitting to blackmailing, framing Armen's murder on Pulgatti, proof of what he did to my mother."

He doesn't know who Armen is, Pulgatti - Kate shared a summary of her mother's murder with him, the case that consumes her life, but kept it surface, holding back the details he assumes are too painful to talk about. Especially with a stranger. But they're obviously important to the story, to Bracken's downfall, and his heart races with hope for her.

"You have proof," he murmurs, earning the snap of her gaze back to him. "You can stop him."

"In this world anyway," she nods, but Castle squeezes her arm.

"There's movies like this, you know, stories where the antagonist ends up in another dimension and doesn't get to go home until their good deed is complete and the moral of the story is made apparent?" She arches her brow at him, but there's a point to his ramblings, one he thinks she'll appreciate. "So maybe this is your moment, Kate. You expose Bracken with the evidence you've been looking for all along, stop him before he can get to you here like he did in your world, before he can hurt anyone else. Maybe that's what sends you home."

"Bracken is the connection," she murmurs thoughtfully, biting her bottom lip. "He was the reason I ended up here."

"And he could be the reason you go back," he finishes for her, slowing to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk next to her.

Kate Beckett looks up at him with so much hope burning amidst the grief in her gaze, that he can't help but share it, hope the same for her. No matter how badly he wants her to stay.

"I need to expose Bracken," she says, her jaw squaring with determination.

"He's attending a Christmas Eve event in Chelsea." Her brow hitches, but he merely shrugs. "I told you I was good at research."

"I'll go," she murmurs, taking another long sip of her coffee before pushing it back into his hand. "You get back to the loft, to Alexis-"

"Kate," he breathes, dropping the coffee to catch her arm. She pauses, staring up at him with a flare of concern. "If - if it works... you said you were shot and then just simultaneously woke up here. What if you leave the same way, just in a flash? I won't get to - I want to be there."

She chews on her bottom lip, torturing him without even knowing. How the hell did he work with this woman for - how long did she say? Over a _year_? And resist her for so long? How was he able to function?

"Castle," she sighs, shaking her head and lifting her empty hands to his chest. "Alexis. That relationship with your daughter, it means everything to you. It did in my universe and it does here, I know it does."

"You're right," he murmurs, covering the palm at his sternum, sealed over his heart. "Like I told my daughter, I screwed up over these last few years, spent too much time sulking and feeling sorry for myself. I drove her away to LA with her mother who's not much better than me but is apparently more bearable," he grumbles, sighing when Kate presses her thumb to his clavicle. "But I'm going to fix it, like I should have a long time ago. But Kate, I - meeting you last night was like waking up. Everything feels clearer now and I don't want that to go away. I don't want you to go away."

"Rick," she whispers, one of her hands ascending to cradle his cheek. He turns his head, kisses her palm.

"But I know this isn't where you belong and I would never ask you to stay," he breathes, closing his eyes, letting the warmth of her palm soak into his skin. "I want to be able to say goodbye, though. I need to be there if something happens to you."

Her eyes harden, the hand still at his chest curling over his heart.

"I'm not letting anything happen to you in this world either, Castle," she says sternly, but he doesn't cower under her gaze, straightening his shoulders instead.

"Same goes for you, Beckett. You die here, you may die in both worlds, and I'm not losing you." He squeezes her hand and lets it go, the fingers at his cheek falling away. "Now, let's do this so I can go pick up a Christmas tree for my daughter."


	8. Chapter 8

Deja vu swirls in the pit of her stomach as they approach the entrance to the hotel, the same venue where her original deal with Bracken took place. Can't be a coincidence.

She turns to him on the stairs outside. "Castle, as your friend, I'm asking you to please-"

"No," he murmurs, nudging her along. She grits her teeth, but she doesn't have the time to argue with him. Bracken is inside, schmoozing with the elite of the city, and something in her gut tells her he's bound to announce his run for presidency. An event like this on Christmas Eve - it provides the perfect opportunity.

They bypass the entry, decorated in garland and cords of golden lights, the bundles of Christmas trees spread out across the hotel lobby that stretch to the high ceilings. They weave through the crowds of people in their tuxes and gowns, sticking out in their street clothes, but making progress with their heads down until they reach a string of velvet ropes halting their path.

"Captain Beckett?" She turns at the call of her name from a hesitant voice, an uncertain looking uniform. Hastings, she thinks, a rookie from back in her detective days. "I'm sorry, but this is a private event. Unless you're on security detail too?"

Kate hesitates. "I'm-"

"Actually," Castle steps in, slipping an arm around Kate's waist. She cuts him a glance from the corner of her eye, catches the charming smile on his lips that he directs at Hastings. "Hi, Richard Castle, best-selling author?" He holds out his hand to the detective, shaking her reluctant fingers with earnest. Kate watches the other woman soften just slightly. "Captain Beckett is here with me. Bracken's an old poker buddy of mine. We weren't staying long, just wanted to drop in and say hello."

"Oh," Hastings murmurs, glancing around, looking for someone with a list of the guest invites, no doubt. "Well, let me just-"

"I do have another engagement to attend, though," Castle adds, squeezing Beckett's hip through her coat. "We're visiting Kate's family for Christmas Eve." He looks down at her with so much adoration, too much, and her intestines tie into knots at the idea. Castle with her and her dad for Christmas... it would be the first time she spent Christmas outside of the precinct since she was able to volunteer, it would be the first time her father didn't retreat to upstate New York to endure the pain of the holiday season secluded in his cabin. She's never imagined Christmas any other way, but spending it with Rick - it's an idea that lights a pleasant warmth through her blood. "We'll be in and out."

Hastings purses her lips for a long moment, but she's wavering. And why wouldn't she? She has a handsome author assuring her with kind eyes and a warm smile and an arm around her captain, whom she would never suspect of any sort of undermining.

"Of course," Hastings finally relents, stepping aside to let them past the velvet rope. "Oh, and Beckett?"

Kate's heart quickens, but she offers the detective her attention before Castle can pull her through. Hastings simply winks at her.

"Congratulations."

A startled laugh slips past her lips, stunned to silence when Castle presses a kiss to her temple and shoots Hastings one last wink.

"Ass," she mumbles, elbowing him in the solar plexus to get him off of her, but he keeps close.

"Hey, if you're going to be with me, a me who is different but still _me_ , you better get used to it, Kate Beckett," he murmurs in her ear. "Because I'm definitely going to want to show you off."

She rolls her eyes, but her stomach simmers with heat.

"Shut up, we need to find the hotel's intercom system."

"Or..." Castle nods to a stereo system tucked into the corner of the room, framed by velvet red curtains in the hotel's ballroom. She curls her fingers around the tape in her coat pocket. "I'm sure they won't mind a brief interlude from the current Christmas playlist."

* * *

They stepped into an electronics store on their way here. He called Alexis to let her know he was on his way, just helping Beckett wrap up the case while Kate found the right device to play such an outdated source of recordings.

He expected disappointment from his daughter, irony about how he was letting her down yet again, but instead, Alexis was surprisingly supportive, encouraging his assistance in Captain Beckett's case.

"We've got all day, Dad, don't worry," she assured him, grunting around her words. "Sorry, I'm trying to get this stupid painting down."

"Is it the peacock one?" he grimaced and Alexis chuckled on the other line.

"The very same. If we're going to have a good Christmas, I don't want this creepy thing staring me down while we decorate," she muttered and then it was Castle's turn to laugh, earning a pleased look from Kate across the store.

"Godspeed, my raven haired Pumpkin," he grinned. "I'll be home soon."

"Tell Kate I said hi," Alexis added before the line disconnected, leaving him with soft surprise to stirke in his chest.

Alexis was never a fan of his dating history, but he knows for a fact that she practically hated him for it over these past few years, especially when he showed up with a girl only a few years older than his own kid.

Yeah, he doesn't blame her for that.

But he's never witnessed her so... approving of another woman before. She actually seems to like Kate. So much so that she's encouraging him to spend time with her.

Damn, both he and his kid are going to be devastated when she's gone.

They mingle their way to the DJ's booth now, smiling politely and making small talk when necessary, keeping an eye out for the senator. The source of music is concealed by a small forest of snow sprinkled Christmas trees, a physical DJ not necessary for the iPhone sitting in the dock to pump Christmas carols through the attached speakers.

The cluster of fake trees offers enough cover for him to slip behind the curtains with Kate, prepare to hook up the cassette player to the speakers and expose Bracken for the murderer he is. Achieve justice for Kate's mother in at least one universe.

"Thanks for letting me be here for this," Castle murmurs as she slides the tape into the player's slot. The converter in her hands will connect through a USB cord to the speakers on the table just inches away, play the content with just as much ease as the iPhone playing the Christmas music now.

"Didn't give me much of a choice, did you?" Kate glances up at him, the corner of her mouth quirking. "There's no one else I'd rather have with me, in either world, Castle."

He sucks in a breath. "Kate-"

"Ready?" she murmurs, closing the player's top and plugging in the USB cord that will connect to the music speakers.

"I'll miss you," he confesses on a rushed exhale, earning the soft gold of her eyes, the bittersweet smile on her lips.

"You'll find me again." She reaches for his hand, drawing his knuckles to her mouth and pressing a kiss there, stealing his breath all over again. "I know it."

He swallows but nods, forces himself to believe it, to feel the conviction of it in his soul.

Rick swipes his thumb to her chin before she lets go of his hand.

"I'm ready."

* * *

No one is paying attention to the stereo system in the back of the room, the risk of her being noticed as she eases from their hiding place behind the curtain minimal.

"Wait in there," she whispers, nodding to a stairwell door at their backs.

"Kate-"

"You wanted to be here, that was the deal, but you don't need to be right at the center of all this," she murmurs, lacking the time to placate him. "I'm going to play that tape and whether it causes me to return to my world or just has the authorities come for me in this one, you shouldn't be so close to the scene."

"What if something happens and you need-"

Kate huffs and bends for her ankle, snagging the gun from her holster and pressing it into his hands. His eyes widen.

"Kate-"

"You know how to use it?"

"Yes, but I-"

"Then if something happens to me, you're my backup, but otherwise, Castle, stay behind that door," she instructs, pushing him backwards by the chest. "Stay safe for me."

He's reluctant, catching her wrist before she can shove him through the stairwell door. He doesn't want to let her go, but she can't waste another moment. She has to get back home, get back to him, and this may finally be her chance.

"And as soon as it's over, go home, be with Alexis for Christmas," she whispers, arching on the toes of her boots to stain a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "Be better for her."

He knocks his forehead into hers, noses brushing, too close, before he finally releases her.

"Promise," he murmurs, backing into the stairwell door and easing through it. The door clicks shut on his sullen face and Kate sucks in a fortifying breath, lowers her eyes to the cassette converter in her hand, the USB cord between her fingers.

She flicks her gaze to her goal, the iPhone's dock she has to unplug from the speaker system, replacing it with the cassette player. It'll take her seconds, as long as she keeps her hands steady and fingers nimble. Seconds for an entire room of New York's finest society members to hear Bracken confess to it all.

She moves for the stereo system.

"Doesn't matter what universe we're in, does it?" Forceful fingers yank at the edge of her coat collar, jerking her back. She chokes on a gasp, but Bracken already has her by the throat, slamming her spine into the wall. He smiles at her, malice and intent burning in his eyes. "You're always going to be a thorn in my side."

Kate hitches her knee up, nailing him in the groin with a satisfying punch that has him yelping. His fingers clench around her neck before he lets go. She collapses to the floor, sucking in a staggering breath, but there's no time to fill her lungs.

"You're not - from here?" she coughs, struggling to her feet, clutching the wall for leverage.

"Oh no, this is my world," he chuckles, straightening up from his bowed position, eyeing the cassette cradled protectively to her chest. "But it's not yours. The Beckett from this world is much smarter, never stuck her nose where it didn't belong like her bitch mother-"

Kate lunges for him, the tape player clattering to the floor at her back. She gets her hands on Bracken first, her strength taking him by surprise.

"But I'm starting to see it all clearly now," he grins, that pretty politician facade falling away as he's face to face with her. "You have to die, in every universe. So as soon as I'm done with you here, I'm going to kill your stupid writer in this world too, just like I probably already have in the one you came from, and then, I'm going to hunt down the Beckett of this world, kill you all over again. Make you extinct."

"Not if I stop every version of you first," she growls, reaching for the gun at her waist, but Bracken rams his elbow into her arm. She hisses at the sharp burn of colliding bones and Bracken drifts back, reaching into his suit jacket and revealing a gun of his own.

"I had a feeling you'd show up. As soon as I was told that your routines changed, that you were colluding with the writer," Bracken snarks, raising the weapon on her, but Kate refuses to let go of her piece, to back down. "You could have just left it alone, left him alone. I liked you, I would have let you live."

"Live like you? Buried in lies?" she scowls. "I'd rather be dead."

"We had an agreement," he reminds her, his polite smile twisting into a snarl. "A truce. Live and let live. I held up my end of the bargain."

"And that makes up for what you took from me? " she grits out, the gun digging into her palm. "You killed my mother-"

"Yes, I'm aware," he drawls, as if he's bored of the fact. "But do you ever consider thinking about what I gave to you? Everything you are, everything you've accomplished, is because of me."

His words alone almost have her rocking back on her heels. Because he can't be serious, he can't be that diluted in his thinking.

"Is that how you justify murder? It builds _character_?" Kate lifts her gun. "Then why don't you give me a chance to build yours? "

Bracken takes a step forward, unshaken by the weapon aimed at his head. "You had a future. Why couldn't you just let this go and move on so I could do the same?"

"Because I'm not like you," she grinds out, her teeth scraping over every word, pure hatred rolling in waves through her blood, boiling beneath the surface of her skin. "And I won't let you get away with it. The truth is going to come out, no matter what you do to me in any world."

Bracken grins, stalking closer to her in the slim strip of space the curtain offers, like a predator closing in on his prey. "There is no truth. It'll die with you, with him."

She pistol whips him, leaving a streak of blood across the high of his cheekbone. He stumbles sideways with a growl.

"You won't touch him," Kate mutters, but panic claws at her chest as she hears the stairwell door creaking open.

Bracken hears it too.

"Wanna bet?" he presses his finger to the trigger, but Castle fires first.

The shot resounds through the ballroom, setting off immediate screams of terror from the guests inside and a loud curse from Bracken's mouth.

"You son of a bitch," he snarls, cradling his hand to his chest, his gun skidding across the ground.

Kate's head spins to find him over her shoulder, lowering her backup piece to his side and bending to snag the cassette converter and its tape from the floor.

"Rick," she breathes, her eyes jumping to Bracken's gun a few feet away, out of reach. "You gotta get out of here."

"No, I won't leave you," he argues, jogging up to stand beside her. "Not until this asshole is behind bars."

"How poetic," Bracken mutters, straightening from his crouched position. Kate returns her attention to the senator just in time to witness his uninjured hand circle to his back, pushing his jacket out of the way. A second weapon. "It'll make his death even more bittersweet for you, eh, Captain?"

" _No_!" Kate shoves him out of the way and instinctively raises her gun, fires two rounds in the same moment Bracken's goes off. Right where Castle was standing, into the spot she filled.

Her shoulder shudders with the first hit, the bullet that would have found Castle's heart, her chest caving in around the second shot that pierces between her breasts, reviving the phantom ache that's resided there from the moment she woke in a foreign universe.

She waits until Bracken is down, lifeless eyes staring back at her as the second gun clatters from his spasming fingers. He staggers backwards, collapsing against the wall, staining it in red. She waits until she's sure he's dead, sure that it's over, before she finally succumbs to the sway of her body, her knees hitting the ballroom floor with a crack that shatters through her bones.

White light explodes behind her eyes like the searing agony exploding through her upper body, blinding her, taking her home.

* * *

The screams resounding through the ballroom pierce his senses, the shout of officers evacuating attendees and putting the place into lockdown. He should go, he knows she would tell him to go, but he's rushing to her side, where he never should have left, and dropping to his knees. The blood on the floor seeps through his slacks.

"Kate, no," he chokes, bowing over her massacred body. Twin bullet holes are embedded in her chest, side by side, and blood is spilling through her coat. So much blood. "Why did you do that? Why would you do that?"

Her words are garbled, the life draining from her eyes, but she holds his as she says it. "Because I love you, Castle. Always - always did."

Her lashes flutter before her eyes begin to roll back, fading from him, and his heart seizes.

"No, _no_ , please don't go," he whispers, clutching her body in his trembling hands. "Not like this. You can't - please, Kate, stay with me. I could - I love you too, I know it," he croaks, staining her neck in streaks of red as he feels for a pulse.

He can hear the wail of sirens, but the heartbeat beneath his fingertips has gone silent.


	9. Chapter 9

The light flashes bright and blinding behind her eyes, forcing her to peel them open. Her lungs expand with a struggling breath, her chest trembling with revival and her fingers burning against the cold ground. The stars bursting through her vision begin to fade, the rush of blood in her ears calming, allowing Bracken's voice to seep in.

"You seem like a reasonable man, Rick." Her heart skips and she blinks past the residual sparks to take in her surroundings, to see Castle standing only a few inches away from her, Bracken's expensive shoes in her line of sight, rooted in the grass directly across from her partner. "You don't have to end up like your girlfriend."

Her eyes scale the senator's figure, up to the gun peeking from inside Bracken's trenchcoat and aimed at Castle.

Rick growls, widening his stance in front of her lifeless body, protecting her even in believed death and putting his body in the line of a sniper she has no doubt is still watching from one of the buildings above.

The hair falling in her face conceals her opened eyes from Bracken, allowing her to see without alerting him to her unexpected survival. For now.

If she's going to do something, she has to do it soon, before the overwhelming burn of the bullet - or was it two bullets? Plural? - drags her under in this world too.

She's home, it has to be. She made it back, but judging by the all consuming fire spreading from between her breasts, it may not be for long. This is her final shot. Her last stand.

"Listen, I know it can't be easy," Bracken attempts to placate him, inching a few steps closer. Kate keeps her eyes on the gun, loaded and ready to fire. "Especially so close to the holidays, but you've got that pretty little redhead to keep you-"

"Don't you _dare_ mention my daughter," Castle seethes, his hands fisting at his sides, white-knuckled and shaking. Ready to fight.

"I was just trying to remind you of the fact that you have more to live for, better things than Kate Beckett. Losing her will hurt, but wasn't she lost already? Hasn't she always been?" Bracken reasons, but Rick doesn't waver, his rage only seeming to build.

"She just wanted justice for her mother, you asshole. The woman you had killed, the woman you made sure was left to bleed out alone in an alley with nothing but garbage-"

"Watch it," Bracken warns, flicking his gun in Kate's direction. She closes her eyes just to be safe, to refrain from allowing her plan to collapse around her and Castle both in this universe as well. God, she hopes the other Rick is okay. "Watch what you say and how loud you say it, Mr. Castle. I was willing to work out a deal with your beloved detective here. She should have learned from her captain that silence can be an invaluable option. If Roy would have stuck to the plan-"

"Roy isn't like you or anyone else you've paid off," Castle growls, taking a step towards Bracken, closing the distance. "Montgomery wanted to do the right thing-"

"And look where that got him," Bracken snaps, laughing a little too hysterically, his composure slipping from its tightly controlled confines. "Look where it got your bitch detective. Dead like her mother, like she should have been all along, like you will be if you don't-"

Now, Castle. _Now_.

Castle lunges for him, slapping the gun from Bracken's hand. It lands only an arm's stretch away from her and her heart rejoices even as her body shudders with dread. She's going to have to move to reach that.

Kate flexes her fingers and extends her arm, an agonizing process, and stretches for the gun with a barely suppressed whimper. Mud catches beneath her nails as she curls her fingers around the weapon, dragging it closer before planting her hand to the ground. Black spots dance across her vision as she forces herself up from the dirt, her entire body shaking from the cold, the blood loss.

She manages to shift into an upright position, raising the gun and aiming for the body stumbling backwards as Castle delivers punch after punch to his face.

"Castle," she croaks, loud enough for both men to hear, to face her with matching expressions of shock. But Rick reacts first, jerking out of the way right as Kate pulls the trigger. A shot explodes through the air, her aim holding true, and hits her target center of mass.

A flower of crimson blossoms in the middle of Bracken's chest. The senator falls to his knees with wide eyes staring back at her. His mouth opens, moving with words she can't hear, until he finally collapses to his side. Not moving, his blood soaking the grass.

Kate drops the gun, her body already succumbing to the same fate, crumbling back to the dirt. But not before Castle can catch her.

"Kate," he breathes, cradling the back of her head in his large palm. The other fumbles at her throat, feeling for a pulse below her jaw. "Oh, Kate, stay with me."

"S-sniper," she gets out, but he's shaking his head, his thumb a pleasant source of contact at the base of her skull, anchoring her. She should tell him that, how well he anchors her when everything else is falling apart, when _she's_ falling apart.

"Esposito got him - has to have got him. I - panic button on my phone, Ryan and I installed it a year ago on a whim," he explains hastily. "Had it in my pocket, pressed it right before you got shot."

Relief flutters through her system and she says a silent prayer of gratitude for her boys.

"Kate," he calls, the overwhelming dose of panic dripping through her name forcing her eyes to flare open, opening to him. She doesn't think she's ever seen him so scared.

She tries to swallow, muster words for him, but all she can manage is a quirk of her lips.

"I got you back," she rasps, feeling his hand skate down to the site of the bullet wounds in her sternum. "My you."

A strangled laugh falls apart on his lips as the tears begin to leak from his eyes. "Yeah, yours, Kate. All yours."

A whine climbs up her throat without her permission, the pain making itself known, and Castle's fluttering hand ascends to cup her cheek, trying so hard to soothe.

"Thought I - I lost you," she groans, the cold seeping into her limbs, blending with the fire in her chest to consume her body in an agonizing white-hot burn.

"No," he chokes, the sounds of sirens wailing in the distance. "No, Kate, you'll never lose me. Please don't let me lose you. Please don't leave me."

She hums, snags her fingers in the leg of his dress pants, the closest part of him she can reach, cling to. Her view of him, his eyes distorted with tears, multi-colored Christmas lights shining at his back, is going blurry.

Oh god, Christmas. If she's back, then that means it's the day before Christmas Eve, hours before midnight. He can't spend his Christmas bowed over her bleeding body. But even if she could manage to piece a sentence together, she won't tell him to go. She can't, can't let him go now.

"Kate, hey, no," he pleads, his voice breaking over her name, breaking her heart. "Don't go to sleep, stay with me."

"Not leaving you again," she mumbles, but her eyes are falling shut. "But you gotta get home, decorate for Christmas with 'Lexis."

"Kate," he calls for her, but she can only hold fast to the fabric between her fingers and hope he doesn't let her go.

* * *

He spends the early hours of Christmas Eve sitting in a waiting room, rising every five minutes to pace. It drives the nurse at the front desk crazy, she keeps offering him tea or hot chocolate, a peppermint, anything to calm him down, but he doesn't want anything, can't stomach it; he's already on the verge of vomiting.

His hands are stained red with the remnants of her blood, bright red and caught beneath his nails.

Castle scrapes his hands through his hair for the millionth time and drops into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, burying his face in his palms. He gags at the scent of copper, rips them away to fist atop his thighs.

"Dad?" His gaze jerks up at the sound of his daughter's voice. Alexis is rushing towards him in a glittering party dress and his heart eases. He knew where she was tonight, enjoying a Christmas party with her friends, the new boy she's seeing, but the mention of his daughter from Bracken's mouth put him on edge, convinced him to call her after Beckett was wheeled away for surgery two hours ago. After he bawled his eyes out in an empty stairwell.

"Pumpkin," he breathes, catching her in an embrace, fisting his hands at her back. Not touching her even though the blood is cleaned from his hands, can't stain her. It's still there.

"What happened?" she whispers, pulling back and roaming frantic eyes over his face. Her skin pales and her hand rises to his tie, shirt collar, stained a shade of deeper red from her blood. It's all over him, god he's covered in Kate's blood. "Daddy-"

"Kate," he chokes out, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. "It was Kate."

Alexis's face loses its last ounce of color. "Someone shot her? Someone - did they try to shoot you? When was this? What happened? Why didn't you call-"

"Alexis," he murmurs, unfurling his fingers to cup her trembling shoulders in his hands. "I'm - I'm sorry I didn't call sooner. Kate... she came to my book party."

"She came?" Alexis whispers, and oh, how he wishes this was a different conversation happening in a different place, that he was gushing to her about this instead of choking back tears. He thinks his daughter would have been happy that he made good on their deal from only days before.

Alexis thought he was a fool for sending her an invitation every year, never outright saying it, but making it known with every disapproving glance towards the stack of invites that never failed to include Kate Beckett.

"Why do you keep trying with her?" she asked him one night, standing in the doorway to his study, exasperated. He didn't blame her; he was becoming pretty exasperated too.

"Because I... I can't just give up on her," he shrugged, tracing his thumb over the script of her name, her address, on the ivory envelope. He thought of her face when he told her he loved her, the rush of emotion in her eyes, the need that rose to her lips, died before it could leave her mouth. She said she couldn't, but that didn't mean she didn't want to. She wanted his love for her, he felt it in the most certain parts of him. Maybe it was arrogant, cocky to assume, but he can't forget the way her eyes lit up on one of the darkest days of their lives the moment he said it.

"But she gave up on you," Alexis pointed out, glaring at the invitation in his hand. "Two _years_ ago, Dad."

The reminder stung, but he could only shake his head, meet Alexis's icy blue eyes. He tried seeing other people, dating pretty blondes, his usual type, only managing to add to Alexis's aggravation. These days, he felt like he couldn't win with his daughter. He was miserable without Kate Beckett and couldn't even fall back to his old ways.

She changed him, ruined him.

"This will be the last invitation I send," he lied to her, himself, even though he probably should have followed his own ultimatum. "If she doesn't respond, I'll let it go. Deal?"

Alexis sighed, crossing her arms and leaning against his office doorframe.

"I don't hate Beckett, Dad. I just hate what she's done to you, hate that she broke your heart and doesn't seem to care."

"It's not that she doesn't care, Pumpkin," he reasoned, remembering the anguish consuming her face the moment before he walked away from her for the last time. "I think she's afraid. She lost her mom, now Montgomery... chasing justice is the harder choice, but for her, it's the safer one."

Alexis pushed off the wall, coming around his desk to prop her hip on the edge, staring down at him with pity in her eyes that he didn't want.

"You told her, didn't you? That day at the funeral?"

Castle quirked his lips, but he already knew the smile was pathetic.

"Oh, Dad," Alexis sighed again, leaning forward to wrap her arms around his neck, hugging him tight. He hugged her back, propping his chin on her shoulder and letting his little girl, his Columbia bound baby bird, suck the sadness right out of him.

It twisted his heart, how badly he still wanted Kate Beckett after nearly two years of nothing, how painful it was; loving her shouldn't hurt so much. But he couldn't stop it, couldn't get rid of it, and that wasn't going to change. It hasn't changed at all.

Castle sighs, squeezing his daughter's slim shoulders in his palms. "Yeah, she was coming in just as I was going out. We - we got coffee and she was telling me everything, how she made a deal, trying to keep me and everyone she cared about safe from the man who killed her mother, from William Bracken."

Alexis's brow skyrockets. "The senator? You... you never told me he was involved on her mother's case."

"Pumpkin, you already knew so much, too much. I put too much on your plate," he sighs. "And I only knew what Ryan and Esposito told me, Kate didn't want me involved-"

"Wait, wait, so - was Bracken at your book party? How did - what _happened_?" she demands in frustration and Castle releases her shoulders. At least talking with his daughter, no matter how frazzled and terrified she is, offers a welcome distraction from staring at the double doors they wheeled Kate's bleeding body through.

Rick nudges her to one of the chairs, taking a seat beside her, and tells her everything.

* * *

Bracken is dead. But Castle is not.

It's the first thought that crosses her mind as she wakes to the rhythmic sound of beeping that matches the pace of her struggling heartbeat. She killed Bracken, in both worlds, extinguished him.

She still needs her elephants. Can't forget the elephants. Bracken is dead, but justice for her mother will not die with him.

But first, she has to find Castle, wants to put him first for once.

Kate's eyes slide open to the familiar sight of a hospital ceiling overhead, but it's not a knife in her side that put her here this time. She attempts a breath, but her chest seizes, pain ricocheting in her ribs, something blocking the air from properly dispersing to her lungs.

Her body instantly panics, her trachea spasming around the tube down her throat. A breathing tube, fuck-

"Kate, Kate, hey, calm down." It's his voice, soft and soothing and pleading gently with her as his hand touches her forehead. She lifts her eyes to him, almost afraid to see his face, confirm which Castle is here with her, what universe she seems to have settled in this time. But she knows those eyes, knows the way he's looking at her, and tears spring to her own. "Oh, love, I know," he whispers, smoothing back the hair from her face. But he doesn't, he really has no idea. "I pressed the call button, they're coming."

She chokes, her throat fighting the breathing tube, trying to swallow.

"Just breathe, Kate. Let the machine breathe for you for just a few more minutes," he whispers, fingers ceaseless at her hairline, stroking the damp strands back from her skin.

She hears noise at the entry, can't manage to tear her eyes from Castle to look, but by the expression of relief that claims his features, it must be a nurse, the doctor, maybe both.

"How long has she been awake?" a male voice asks, circling around to her opposite side and shining a pen light in her eyes. She keens in response, unable to stop the unbearable noise, triggering a flare of panic through Castle.

"Not long," he murmurs to the doctor, gaze flickering to the doctor for a split second before returning to her. "Hold on, love, just hold on."

She squeezes her eyes shut, attempts to think about anything other than the tube lodged down her throat. Like how Castle keeps calling her _love_.

"Alright, Ms. Beckett, I'm going to remove the tube from your throat," the doctor informs her, his voice quiet and calm, reassuring. "Your body's natural reflex will be to gag, but try not to panic, okay? Just listen to your body and try your best to breathe."

The tube slides from her throat with a sharp tug and her body wants to break into a million pieces. Her chest shudders, spasms violently, and every cough that rattles her lungs creates even more jagged pieces inside of her. Fuck, it's worse than being shot, the agony endless.

"Breathe, Kate," Castle whispers the reminder in her ear. "Just breathe, you're doing so good-"

The tears stream like a river from her eyes, overflowing and hot, and she tries to reach for him, nails catching on his forearm.

"Cas-"

"Shh, I've got you," he promises, bowing over the side of her hospital bed, holding but not suffocating her as she heaves in breath after breath until each inhalation of air no longer feels like it's splitting her in two.

"You likely won't be able to talk for a little while, Captain Beckett," the doctor explains, soft, as if he's reluctant to interrupt. Kate finally casts her attention to the man with grey hair and blue eyes, kind eyes. Reminds her of Castle's. "Your vocal cords are going to be in shock for a little while, so let them rest if you can."

"Good thing I'm the talker," Castle mumbles, but the smile on his lips is trembling, moisture swelling along the lids of his eyes.

The doctor, she doesn't even know his name, smiles. "Just call if she's in pain, if she has any trouble breathing. The first few hours without the vent will be the most critical."

Castle nods. "I'll watch her."

She finds his hand on her ribcage, resting over the scar of her stab wound. God, she never thought she would be relieved to feel it carved into her skin again. Her fingers curl through two of his and Castle strokes his thumb along her knuckles, careful of the IV taped to the back of her hand.

"I'm not going anywhere, Kate," he murmurs, but it's not him who she's worried will disappear.

"Don't - don't let go of me," she rasps, the single sentence shredding her throat to pieces.

"Okay," he promises, reaching behind him for a chair, tugging it to the edge of her bedside. "I'm staying right here."

It's selfish of her, asking him to stay with her like this, especially when she knows it's Christmas Eve. At least, it was edging into the early hours of the holiday the last she remembers. God, she hopes she hasn't slept through Christmas, hasn't kept him here with her and away from his family.

"Rest, Kate," he murmurs, thumb skimming her brow. She turns into the gentle cup of his palm, presses her cheek into the warmth, and hears his breath catch.

Her eyes flutter, ascending to study his face, blurring with the growing weight of her eyelids. Before Bracken, before the bullets, he was kissing her in the park, the joy spilling from his lips onto hers. But now, he looks so worn down, so drained and exhausted, astounded. Too in awe, as if he somehow thought she would wake from surgery with no memory of what she said, what she wants. If she would wake at all.

She wants her voice, wants to talk, tell him how much she missed him no matter how delusional it's bound to make her sound. She wants to apologize again for wasting so much time, wants to tell him how beautiful he is; she wants to tell him how she loves him.

"K-kiss me," she whispers hoarsely instead.

She expects him to protest, the residual panic in his eyes over the breathing tube still alight, but he doesn't deny her, doesn't even hesitate. Castle leans in, brushes his lips over hers in a kiss that is far too fleeting, but just enough. Enough for now.

"I thought you were dead," he confesses against the corner of her mouth, the tip of his nose nudging her cheek. "The bullets hit, it sounded like so many bullets all at once, and you were down, you weren't moving-"

Her voice is done, her vocal cords on a fierce strike, all the words she wants to say trapped in the hollow of her throat. But she turns into him, noses colliding, lips dusting his once more.

"I'm just so glad you're alive," he exhales, some of the grief abandoning him with the breath he expels. "Thank god you're alive, Kate."

Her lashes brush his cheeks as she closes her eyes, inhales the scent of him beneath the layer of antiseptic from the hospital, the faint smell of blood staining his skin. She drifts with his forehead against hers, his aftershave in her nose, and his presence rooting her firmly in this world with him. Where she belongs.


	10. Chapter 10

"You should go home," she murmurs from her hospital bed, watching him stretch from the chair he's standing on to string the lights across the length of her windows. He's going to fall, hurt himself, and end up in a hospital room of his own with no one to decorate. Kate sighs, expelling the breath slowly. She has two bullet wounds in her chest, one between her breasts, the other just a little higher, closer to her shoulder. Breathing hurts. "Rick, it's Christmas Eve."

"Exactly," he grins back at her, hooking the last of the twinkling lights over the edge of the window's blinds. It's only been a few hours since she fell into a heavily medicated sleep with him right beside her, anchoring her, barely thirty minutes since she woke to a Christmas tree in the corner of her room and a Santa hat on her IV pole.

"Castle. Alexis," she reminds him, earning an intrigued spark in his gaze.

"Worried I won't be home in time to decorate?" he inquires, lighthearted but inquisitive. "You mentioned getting home to decorate with her before you passed out in the park."

She wets her lips, chapped and aching. "Dream. Dreamed that Alexis was living in LA, with Meredith-"

"A nightmare," Castle corrects on a mutter, stepping down from the chair and back to admire his handiwork.

"She was going to leave, but you convinced her to stay for Christmas, hopefully for longer. But we'd never met," she adds a little quieter, watching his head swivel over his shoulder to see her.

"You and me?" he asks and she frowns in response. She hasn't stopped wondering what's going to happen to the other Castle, but Bracken is dead in that world too, the threat neutralized in every universe - that they know of - and he's safe. He'll either move on or find another version of her that will hopefully let him love her with less of a fight, he'll mend his relationship with his Alexis, and he'll be okay.

He'll be okay.

"Never met," she confirms, swallowing around the lump in her throat. "We never worked together, you never wrote Nikki Heat, it - was all wrong."

"Kinda like _A Wonderful Life_ ," he muses softly, approaching her bedside and descending to his chair next to her. "Life would suck without you, Beckett."

His lips quirk but hers fail to lift from their frown.

"I wasn't with you for two years," she whispers, lowering her eyes to fixate on the top button of his shirt, a rich forest green fabric Alexis must have brought for him to change into. "In this world."

"Kate," he murmurs, draping his warm palm at her forearm. She wants to huff in frustration, reach for his hand and twine it through hers, but moving her arm would set off a chain reaction of agony through her body and she can't bear any more. "I don't know how much of our conversation you remember before you were shot-"

"All of it," she assures him, returning her gaze to lock with his. "I meant all of it."

The corners of his mouth curl with affection and he ducks his head just slightly, uncharacteristically bashful. Cute.

"Good, but you told me to stop with the 'what if's," he murmurs, rubbing his thumb to the inside of her wrist, around the scallop of bone. "We have regrets, but if I can have you now..." He shakes his head and meets her eyes, his a brighter blue than she's ever seen, looking so damn happy. "Forget the rest, Kate. I just want you."

He lifts from the chair to crouch over her, kiss her forehead. She tilts her chin, careful not to make any swift movements. The morphine only does so much for the pain that radiates stronger with every breath.

His lips land between her brows and he grins, bumping his nose to hers as he cradles her cheek in his hand, grazes another kiss to the corner of her eye.

"Castle," she mumbles, wanting his mouth on hers, warm and promising. "I-"

A knock on the door has her eyes reluctantly abandoning his to witness his daughter bustling through the doorway with two large, Christmas themed flower pots in her arms. The huge red poinsettias block her face until she cranes her neck over the petals, finds the both of them staring at her.

"Oh, hey guys," she chuckles, glancing nervously to her father. "I'm sorry, Kate. I thought you'd still be asleep."

She's almost surprised by the welcome sight of Alexis's fiery red hair.

"No, I'm glad you're here," she breathes, watching Alexis blink, her already red cheeks softening to a rosy pink.

"Yeah?" Alexis asks, shuffling the rest of the way inside and placing the poinsettias to a spare spot on the table that isn't filled with crowds of other bouquets that she's told came from the precinct.

"Kate's been worried about you missing out on the decorating," Castle muses, his fingers squeezing gently at her wrist before he slips away from the edge of her hospital bed.

He steps forward to tug his daughter into an embrace, tight and secure, and quickly returned by Alexis. He murmurs something against the top of her head before pressing a kiss there, making his daughter laugh, and Kate's heart further calms. She knew from the moment she woke, saw him, that she was back in her universe, but witnessing Castle and his daughter interacting with such ease only confirms it.

"Dad's definitely very efficient on his own when it comes to decorating," Alexis comments, casting her gaze across the room, her lips curling into a smirk. "The nurses must be thrilled."

"Oh, they are," Kate chuckles, trying not to openly wince at the spike of fire in her throat, trickling down to sear her sternum. Laughter is bad, so bad when you have a throat sore from a breathing tube and two bullet holes in your chest.

"Scrooges, all of them," Castle huffs, leaving his daughter's side to bend over an open box on the tiny sofa against the wall, rising with a bright red ornament dangling from his finger. "Want to help me decorate the tree, Pumpkin? Beckett can supervise."

"Your tree at home-" Kate starts, earning both Castles' attention, before pausing. She almost asks if they've finished decorating it, but here, in the real world, the Castle she knows would have his entire loft covered in Christmas decor the day after Thanksgiving. "I've never seen it."

"Oh, do you want to?" Alexis asks, digging in her coat pocket for her cellphone, tapping the screen while she approaches Kate's hospital bed. She holds out the device for Beckett to see and Kate's lips automatically split into a smile at the photo of Castle posing in front of a magnificent Christmas tree that ascends to the loft's ceiling.

"Wow, it's perfect," she grins, lifting her eyes to his daughter. She never forgot the girl's expression that day in the cemetery, when she caught Castle hanging back with Kate at the funeral, no doubt already aware of all the ways Kate was ripping his heart to shreds. So wary and worrisome, angry and exasperated.

She doesn't see a trace of that now. Only hope, well-tamed and kept at bay, but alive.

"Want to see the rest of the loft? You've never been there during Christmastime, have you?" Alexis asks, turning the phone back around, her index finger swiping quickly across the screen. "Dad and I go all out every year-"

"Don't ever let that change," Kate murmurs and Alexis eyes flicker back to hers. A question is forming on her lips while Castle's curiosity blooms in the background, and Kate is quick to explain. "Your traditions, I mean. They're special."

Alexis's mouth softens into a smile. "Yeah, they are. But Dad and I... we could always add another tradition to the mix." She meets Kate's eyes from beneath her lashes, delicately assessing how far she can push, gauging where Kate stands. How serious she is about Alexis's father. "If that was something you wanted to be a part of."

"Alexis," Castle murmurs at her back, his tone an octave higher, but Kate holds his daughter's gaze.

"I'd love that."

* * *

Whatever test Alexis is not so subtly attempting to perform with Kate, his partner seems to pass.

His daughter takes a seat on the very edge of Beckett's hospital bed, scrolling through photo after photo. At first, it's just the loft during Christmas time, but then it's Christmases past, family photos, including a few goofy ones that have his ears turning red - Rick building a snowman and a few of him dressed up as Santa. Intimate glimpses of his life that he never planned to share with Kate. He didn't think she'd ever care to see.

But Kate's smile is bright, her cheeks swelling with every new picture.

"Aww, Castle, you were so cute back then," she grins, adoration she's never allowed him to witness before spilling through her features.

"Back then?" he huffs, abandoning what has become a solo task of decorating the Christmas tree he hauled into her room at daybreak and craning his neck over Alexis's shoulder to view the photo she's sharing. It's him in the damn Santa suit Beckett's never going to let him live down, cradling his baby daughter to his chest, taken by his mother no doubt. The corner of his mouth twitches, but he hides it in favor of a groan. "Pumpkin, how do you have so many photos on your phone?"

"I keep them all on a drive I can access online," she says smugly.

"Just wait until Kate really does come over. I'm showing her those pictures I have of you dressed as an Elf on a Shelf," he smirks, earning the halfhearted smack of her hand to his hip.

"Kate doesn't need to see..." Alexis's sentence trails as she glances to her side, Beckett's face turned towards them, but her eyes closed. "It's good for her, to sleep, right?"

"Very good," Castle murmurs, watching his daughter slip from the edge of Kate's hospital bed.

"How bad is it? The damage from the bullets?" Alexis inquires, her gaze remaining on Kate, the bandages they can both see peeking out from the loose collar of her hospital gown. "Can she even have anything for Christmas? Like hot chocolate or cookies? Christmas dinner?"

"I... I don't know," he murmurs, frowning. "So far, she's been surviving on ice chips and the smoothie the doctor let me grab for her during lunch. I can ask, though."

"Maybe we could still make our Christmas dinner and have it here," Alexis suggests, turning to him with the spark of a bright idea in her eyes. "And we could make enough to share with the whole hospital, for anyone stuck here on Christmas. I mean, it's kinda like what we do for the homeless shelter every year the day after Christmas, right?"

"Yeah, actually," he nods, his heart clenching with pride for his little girl, with relief. He understood her, her reasons, but wouldn't have been able to handle her holding onto past resentments for Kate, especially not now. But it isn't bitterness his daughter has been treating Kate with for the last hour, it's been warmth, compassion, kindness - all of Alexis's best traits. "That sounds perfect, but are you okay with that? Spending your Christmas here?"

"It's where you'll be," she points out, but there isn't resentment for him, his loyalty to Kate, either.

"Yeah, but if you-"

"Dad, Kate was nearly killed last night," she murmurs, some of the joy in her eyes succumbing to the truth of their harrowing reality. "It's a - well, kind of a Christmas miracle that she's alive after something like that."

His throat thickens with the reality of _that_.

"Yeah, it is," he confirms, his eyes drifting back to the woman in the hospital bed. Pale and weak and beautifully alive. "Christmas miracle."

"I'd never ask you to spend Christmas at home while she's here alone and like I said, new traditions," she shrugs. "And you know Gram will come too, plus-" Alexis's words are cut short as Castle bands his arms around her, smothers her in an embrace. She huffs, but hugs him back. "Dad-"

"You're a really good kid," he mumbles into her hair.

"You raised me well," she sighs, pressing her cheek to his shoulder before pulling away. "But if we're going to have a huge Christmas feast here, I need to go buy more ingredients."

"Here," Castle pats his coat pocket. "Take my credit-"

"Already got it," she grins, rising on her toes to drop a quick kiss to his cheek. "And check with Kate's doctor about what she's allowed to eat and drink. I'll make an extra thermos of my famous hot chocolate just in case."

"Will do, Pumpkin." He watches his daughter stride out of the hospital room with purpose, red hair flying behind her.

It really must have been a nightmare if Kate was dreaming about he and Alexis being so severely at odds that she chose to live in LA with Meredith over him. Then again, if the tension between them would have grown any further, maybe it wouldn't have been too far off of an idea.

He shudders at the thought, Alexis being so far away and distant. What a sorrowful life, to lose his daughter and never have Kate either, to never even _know_ her.

It isn't a reality he would survive.

* * *

"Good kid," Kate echoes, startling him out of his thoughts. Castle spins around to see her watching him through slit lids. "Sorry."

"You were awake?" he chuckles, drifting to her bedside. She makes a noise in her throat before he sits down in his chair, tapping her fingers to the strip of space beside her.

He hesitates and she narrows her gaze on him until he relents.

"I don't want to hurt you," he mutters, lowering oh so carefully to the very edge of the bed. She rolls her eyes. "Hey, I'm not tiny like Alexis-"

"Then move me over a little," she says, receiving a look of horror in response.

"Kate, I'm trying _not_ to hurt you-"

"I _want_ you," she growls, satisfaction blooming through her stomach at his raised eyebrows. "We were finally... close, but then Bracken showed up and I had that - that dream and I've missed you."

"Okay, okay," he breathes, rising from the bed with hands hovering at her side. "But if it hurts too much, if I do anything-"

"I'll tell you," she assures him, inhaling a slow breath and gritting her teeth before he slips his hands below her shoulder and her thigh. He slides her over just slightly, an inch in a second, but the fiery agony that sputters and pops through her chest carries the punishment of a mile.

"Too much?" he whispers, but her eyes are squeezed shut, the air rushing down her throat to replenish her lungs of their stolen breath.

"Just give me a second," she exhales, feeling him take a gentle seat on the edge once more. "I hate this."

"I hate seeing it," he admits, stroking a fingertip over the white knuckles of her fist. She unfurls them at his touch, hooks one of her fingers through his. "Kinda hate that we won't get to make out again for a while too."

She laughs and groans, squeezing the finger knotted with hers. "Don't remind me and don't make me laugh. Hurts."

"Don't remind you, huh?" he grins, watching her when she opens her eyes. She can't lift her arms past her waist yet, can't touch his face with her hands like she wants to, but she can tug on his hand, drop her gaze to the space beside her.

"Slide in," she murmurs, relaxing back against the elevated head of her hospital bed. He's careful, every move measured, but then he's nestling into the hospital bed beside her, his body aligning alongside hers. She hums, relishing the warmth of him against her, and lowers her cheek to his shoulder. "And it's been four years, so yeah, don't remind me."

He chuckles, his chin brushing her forehead as he whispers his lips along her hair. "It'll be worth the wait."

"Mm, never doubted that."

A gasp escapes, ruffling the oily strands of her hair that are likely in desperate need of a wash. But she can only smile into his shirt, rest her cheek a little heavier against him.

"So you did think about it."

She scoffs, not as much snark as she would like in the sound, but her throat will only allow her so much leverage. "Like you didn't."

"Oh, all the time," he answers without hesitation and she has to bite her lip to keep the giddiness bubbling in her chest in check. "Seriously, from the moment we met to the moment we ran into each other outside my book party."

"You looked good," she muses, flexing her fingers to lace them through the spaces between his. "Beautiful man."

"Kate," he mumbles her name around a stuttered breath, not expecting that and branding her crown with the heat of her name.

She unseals her cheek from his shoulder, propping her chin to the rounded edge of his bone instead. His ears are pink and she grins, delighted by the fact that she can make Richard Castle blush.

"I'm still mourning the dress," he murmurs. She has to think for a moment, remember what he's talking about, and - oh, her dress. She knows it has to be ruined, devastated by bloodstains, but she has no idea where her personal belongings are. She woke up in this bed and a hospital gown twenty-four hours ago and she hasn't asked nearly enough questions.

She's been too caught up in the relief of being home.

"What happened to it?"

"I was told they had to cut it off of you," he sighs, definitely mournful. "I never even got to see it."

"You'll see the next one," she murmurs, smirking as he arches his brow at her. "You can be the one to cut it off too."

"Kate Beckett," he gasps, but the laughter is spilling from the corners of his mouth, his eyes bright with it. "Pain medication brings out the best in your dirty mind."

"Late Christmas gift," she teases, but Castle's eyes are shifting to a serious shade of blue, saying too much without saying anything at all.

"My Christmas gift was you showing up to my book party," he murmurs, his thumb stroking back and forth along the inside of her wrist, over her quickening pulse. "It was you telling me you wanted me."

"I love you," she whispers, feeling his breath leave his lungs. Hers should do the same, her heart should pound and her palms should sweat, but there's no fear in the realization of loving him anymore. It's just true, a beautiful truth that soothes the angry fire licking along her ribcage and charring the remains of her chest. "I love you and I'll always come back to you."

She expects a furrowed brow, a question on his lips, but regardless of the fact that he's not aware of the full context, the words don't faze him. They hold true without it, whether she's traveling through an alternate reality or letting him go on a sunny day in a cemetery, running away from what she wants or finally succumbing to it, the result will always be the same.

She loves him and she'll always find her way home.

"You - yeah?" he breathes, his eyes alight with love and Christmas lights, and Kate quirks her brow.

"Not the response I was hoping-"

Castle quiets her with the press of his lips, tender and slow over hers, caressing. Her heart does beat a little harder then.

"You know I love you back," he mumbles against her mouth, the hand not tangled with hers rising to cradle her jaw. "Never stopped loving you, Kate."

* * *

 **A/N:** **I realize there are still a lot of unanswered questions in this story, but they won't remain that way for long. Keep an eye out for a brief sequel coming soon.**

 **In the meantime, I'm wishing the most magical of Christmases and happiest holidays to all who celebrate and again, thank you so much for reading.**


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